SOURCE: “Narrative in Michael Ondaatje's ‘the man with seven toes’,” in Canadian Literature, No. 137, Summer, 1993, pp. 63-74.

In the following essay, Wilton analyzes Ondaatje's narrative technique in the man with seven toes, particularly the unconscious and conscious participation of the reader in the text.

The man with seven toes may be seen as Michael Ondaatje's first major narrative. However, reading this text as narrative presents numerous difficulties, not the least of which is the tendency of the individual poems to elicit lyric expectations that in fact resist narrative continuity. The design of the book, with its broad pages, visually emphasizes the independence of the poems, and the poems themselves tend to contain short flashes of imagery or meaning, resembling photographs or paintings hung in a series. The poem's evocation of conflicting lyric and narrative expectations disorients the reader, compelling her or him into an active awareness of the...