SOURCE: Fledderus, Bill. “‘The English Patient Reposed in His Bed Like a [Fisher?] King’: Elements of Grail Romance in Ondaatje's The English Patient.” Studies in Canadian Literature 22, no. 1 (1997): 19-54.

In the following essay, Fledderus correlates several aspects of the characters and plot of The English Patient to various character types and narrative elements that typify Arthurian romance and medieval quest literature.

The word on the street and in newspaper commentary about Michael Ondaatje's 1992 novel The English Patient, especially since a movie version came out in 1996, is that the story marks a return to “the good old-fashioned romance.” This common quip bears a second glance, for beyond the novel's superficial connections with thirty years of mass-market, formula love-stories and with 1930s Hollywood movie plots, this novel is self-consciously rooted in a body of literature with which the term “romance” was originally used: twelfth-and thirteenth-century retellings of Arthurian legends. The...