Jim's Respons to "The English Patient"

Two images: one horrific and one beautiful. How could anyone like the image on the left, yet what innocence and beauty portrayed by the image on the right. War is the image on the left and love the imge in the photo on the right. What a horrible way to die; in war , what a waste.

What a pointless endeavor.

This is one of the themes that I get from The English Patient. Kip realized the pointlessness of war starting on page 282. I find it hard to imagine what it would have been like risking your life every day defusing bombs to save lives and then finding out that two massive bombs had killed thousands of people instantly and they were dropped by those who he was disarming bombs for. To Kip a life was a life and it did not matter if you were Britsh, German, Italian, American, or Japanese; a life was a life.

The other theme that jumped out at me was one of an overall dislike of ownership and boundaries, or borders. On p.261, It states, "We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon an earth that had no maps." This is a very important passage in the novel and I believe it to be one of the main themes. It caused me to realize that most wars are fought over ownership of lands or possession of people an/or resources, and if we did not have boundaries and ownership as much a lot of war would be avoided.

This novel was beautifully written and time after time in the reading of it I came upon passages such as, " ...a tarpaulin to hold the rain of real life away from him."(p194) that added a beauty to the book just from the reading of it. This novel touched on many aspects of love and war and went deep into eexploring many of them. It is now one of my favorite reads, but I will have to soak it up at least a couple of more times to get more of what it yearns to give me.