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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 The sappers became permanently suspicious of any object placed casually in the room. They found it impossible to trust anything as concrete at the time of war. They realise that even the concrete thing like buildings and landscape had become just a temporary thing and there is no permanence to it. Even those murdered by the retreating army are still dangerous. The corpses that were hanging down from the bridges were sometimes mined and were blown up in the mid air. They realized that the life became plainly absurd by the end of the war. They overcome the disillusioned that the war is over and everybody can simply go home once the fighting has ended. Ondaatje presents the post world war society as The Heroic Age of bomb disposal, a period of individual prowess, when urgency and a lack of knowledge and equipment led to the taking of fantastic risks . . . It was, however, a Heroic Age whose protagonists remained obscure, since their actions were kept from the public for reasons of security. It was obviously undesirable to publish reports that might help the enemy to estimate the ability to deal with weapons (196). Ondaatje views the process of setting mine fields as the most abominable strategy of treating an entire civilian population as the enemy. He condemns the manipulations of the constructive power of science for destructive purposes. Natania Rosenfeld comments in the article “Less Light: The End(s) of Aestheticism in Pater, Ondaatje and Sebald” that the novel highlights “the incongruity of natural and manmade disasters. The flash of a bomb blast may resemble lighting, but the former indicates man’s terrible manipulations of nature, not his harmony with, or even his mimesis of natural world” (358-359). Ondaatje imputes the machinations of capitalist reification by presenting the appallingly high casualty rates in bomb disposal units mass in 1940 when Britain was caught in a state of siege after the falling of France. The life expectancy of the sappers during this period was about ten weeks. In the month of August 1940, the blitz had begun and the sappers noticed that there were almost 2,500 unexploded bombs mined in all parts of the country. The roads were closed and the factories and streets were deserted owing to the dangers of the bomb. The ration increased gradually and by the month of September the number of live bomb had reached 3,700. The death toll increased continuously during this period Ondaatje considers that the Second World War has destroyed the utopian vision of the world. The modern inventions of man like Atomic bombs and other delayed action bombs ruined the peace of the people. There was no safety and security for the lives of the common man who remained ignorant of the devastating schemes of the rulers. He regards that the instrumentalisation of reason in technology has taken one of its most perverted forms. The linguistic adaption to death contains the schema of modern mathematics. “If a man’s life could be capitalized as X, the risk at Y, and the estimated damage from explosion at V, then a logician might contend that if V is less than X over Y, the bomb should be blown up; but if V over Y is greater than X, an attempt should be made to avoid explosion in Situ” (212). The war disillusioned the lives of the people. The routine life of the people was almost completely shattered with the explosion of the atomic bomb. Almasy finds it difficult to continue reading after the war, since the war has ended with an event so terrible that even the act of lighting a match feels dangerous. He alludes to the world wars as the most terrible incidents in the history of the world. Sudha Rai in the article entitled “Ondaatje’s The English Patient: Ideology and Form” examines how Ondaatje’s the novel is placed against “the backdrop of war are wounds, burns and scarring memories, as permanent in their residues as the mutilation of limbs and the agonized deaths of victims of the war” (158). Vol. II. Issue. III 168 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 5 Ondaatje presents a vivid picture of the horrors of the war so as to avert the world wars in the future. He appeals to the humanity in general to foster a sense of loyalty and kindness to the fellow beings. He ascertains that only when the boons of science and technology is mobilised in a constructive way, the life becomes meaningful. He calls for a utopian society where human beings can live without the horrors and terrors of the outside world. Works Cited: Brandabur, A. Clare. “Pastiche and Archetypal symbolism in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” Journal of Indo-Canadian Studies 2.1 (2002): 93-111. Clark, Robert. “Knotting Desire in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.2 (2002): 59-70. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Rai, Sudha. “Ondaatje’s The English Patient: Ideology and Form.” Writers of Indian Diaspora: Theory and Practice. Ed. Jasbir Jain. Jaipur: Rawat. 156-167. Rosenfeld, Natania. “Less Light: The End(s) of Aestheticism in Pater, Ondaatje and Sebald.” Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (2006): 349-366. Project Muse 28 Jan. 2010 . Vol. II. Issue. III 169 September 2011
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