ABSTRACT
In “A Geocritical Approach to the Role of the Desert in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Sarah Ager urges the reader to address the complex relationships between characters and the spaces they occupy. Written between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, both novels look retrospectively at events of World War Two in the Western Sahara, showing how the desert space changes over time and how it is perceived during the lifetimes of the protagonists. Following Marc Augé’s concept of “non-places,” Ager asks whether the physical desert is represented as a merely transitory space, in contrast to Gaston Bachelard’s geocritical conception of “home” as a mental space. Ager argues that the space of the desert both forms and challenges the characters’ sense of identity and belonging.
