ABSTRACT
Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel, The English Patient, tells the stories of some characters who take refuge in an abandoned Italian villa outside Florence in the final year of World War II. In particular, Ondaatje’s brief flirtation with the discursive potential of Odysseus highlights the complementarity as well as the contrast between travel and home. Ondaatje places the works of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus firmly at the center of his novel set in World War II Europe. The text of Herodotus contains no information about the identity of the English Patient—people eventually learn that he is a Romanian spy, Count Ladislaus de Almasy, thanks to the dogged and morphine-aided investigations of Caravaggio. In many ways, Scheria, the island the Phaeacians inhabit, functions as a liminal space in the poem, halfway between the world of Odysseus’s travels and his native Ithaca, and his brief sojourn there helps prepare him to make that transition home.
