SOURCE: Ellis, Susan. “Trade and Power, Money and War: Rethinking Masculinity in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.” Studies in Canadian Literature 21, no. 2 (1996): 22-36.

In the following essay, Ellis discusses Ondaatje's representation of masculinity in The English Patient, demonstrating how the novel constructs a masculine identity through personal relationships instead of traditional cultural assumptions about masculine autonomy, isolation, and individuation.

As Almásy, the English patient, slowly reveals his story in the pages of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, he describes leaving his mortally injured lover hidden in a cave and walking out into the Libyan Desert to find help. In the course of his three-day trek he realizes that “There is God only in the desert. … Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war. Financial and military despots shaped the world” (250). The novel depicts a world and four individual lives that are “in near...