Ondaatje\u27s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative

Beverley Curran argues in her paper Ondaatje\u27s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative that Ondaatje reconfigures in his novel the romantic figure of the father/artist as a clandestine lover, a drug addict, or an eccentric translator, all figures with dependencies. In The English Patient, the father or artist\u27s sense of source, continuity, or authority are translated into a narrative which rejects the perverse captivity demanded of the lover and the translator by fidelity or by the tenets of realistic representation. Using sex, drugs, and translation, Ondaatje deranges both time and space to reconfigure the role of the artist as a translator in an attempt to dislocate the false rhapsody of art or historical explanation and their authority and relocate the site of the story. Creation is less a preoccupation than contradiction and the consequences of choice in this novel, and instead of the textual strategies of realist narrative to maintain self-other relations of dominance to establish authority, Ondaatje applies translation to narrative in the novel so that, at the story\u27s heart there is deferment, for a translation is never definitive