The English Patient compared to The Lost Land
...anna intensify his true feelings on exile and the lack of a home to call his own are revealed. He is a man that identifies with his work and his life, if he were to identify with a nationality or a land it would be the desert. And yet still he would call no nation his own, he blames nationality for the death of his colleague Madox. “We were German, English, Hungarian, African-all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations. (pg 138)” Almasy enjoyed the desert and partially identified with it because it had no borders and it was constantly changing with an eclectic mix of inhabitants, all of whom Almasy enjoyed. Almasy learns from all of the wandering inhabitants of the desert and takes a piece of the culture and assimilates that into his own sense of being. Through Almasy, Ondaatje’s feelings about Identity and nationality shine through, as Almasy’s exile has been a liberating factor in his character development. He uses his lack of homeland identity as a crutch to experience life without rules and boundaries governed by nations. The narrator in Eavan Boland’s Lost Land, immediately establishes a tone of longing for her “Lost Land”, her native land of Ireland. Boland’s narrator’s feelings of exile are quite contrasting to those of Almasy, in that she needs her country to complete her identity. In the poem, The Lost Land, the importance of her native country Ireland becomes quite evident in the fact that she does not feel whole. “I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: …an island in its element.(pg40)” She lives in California teaching most of the year, her exile is career imposed and is a debilitating force in her life...