The Nation as “International Bastard”: Ethnicity and Language in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient SHANNON SMYRL Perhaps what all of us have to look at more closely is the perspective, the positioning implied by the concept of ethnicity as it is used and how it has been translated and responded to by the institutions and realities of our society. — Enoch Padolsky (“Establishing” 27) M ICHAEL ONDAATJE’S The English Patient explores the problem of cultural identity as the characters negotiate the end of an era of political and cultural organization. As Lorna Irvine notes, the novel, set at the end of the Second World War, “illustrates, by its very imagery and content, the breakdown of Empires” (144), demon- strating “crises of legitimation, not only for the dispossessed characters whose fiction this is, but also in terms of the institutions of western cul- ture” (140). Kip’s thoughts about Hana in the English patient’s bedroom emphasize the urgency of interpreting such crises, as they produce the po- tential for new forms of cultural interaction: “If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacher- ous and complex journey. It was a very wide world. And the Englishman woke at any sound, the hearing aid turned to full level when he slept, so he could be secure in his own awareness” (113). Kip presages a new form of self-knowledge that will emerge from the decentralization of cultural and political influence, suggested by the sleeping English patient. He struggles through the narrative to control the interpretation of his own experiences and actions but too often feels, as he does while Hana sleeps in the field, “as if in someone’s rifle sights, awkward with her. Within the imaginary painter’s landscape” (114). The scene in the bedroom drama- tizes an optimistic response to the decline of a homogenizing Western in- fluence, suggesting the possibility of self-invention: