De-subjectification and Meaning of Faceless Other in The English Patient

Abstract

This paper aims to explore Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient to find how modern subjectivity and modern art have proved to be exhaustible through modern history and modern art history by closely reading the novel with theoretical scaffoldings including Deleuze and Guattari's idea of nomadism and de-subjecitification and the contextualization between life and book. On the surface level, the novel adopts a detective/war plot but severely maimed face of the English patient, the protagonist, is the focal point in this novel inquiring what the meaning of this erased faciality is. In fact, the English patient's face, a metaphor of the corporeal book and the history, figuratively links to the geography and geology of the Western-centered fascism and resistance. The English patient at first chooses absolute deterritorialization but his nomadic journey fails as he becomes obsessed with possession of Katherine. Yet, the English patient's persistent efforts to disguise himself also opens a way of communication to heal not only his trauma but other characters'. Through these analysis and arguments, this paper intimates that de-subjectification through communicating Others via corporeal metaphor embodies true nomadism.