Who we are is shaped by where we come from. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay This is a common thread in the human experience; our origins give way to our personalities. But what happens when a person disagrees with their nation's limits on their identity? The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje explores what happens when a person attempts to break from the mold of their homeland and raises the question of whether or not misfits can find a truly nationless place, from which to forge their own identify. At the end of World War II, the novel depicts a time when nationalist tensions are high throughout the world. There is indeed a heightened sense of national responsibility. And yet, the main characters of the novel all try to escape it. Hana, a young war nurse, is from Canada. However, instead of advancing through Italy with the rest of the nurses and the Canadian infantry, she chooses to stay behind and care for a single unnamed man, whom she simply calls the English Patient. This man is called "her desperate saint" and as she cleans his naked, ruined body, she imagines that he has the "hips of Christ" (page 3). It's clear that she not only cares about him, but adores him, perhaps because he's the only thing that keeps her going. Although, unlike her patient, Hana's body is intact, the same cannot be said of her mind. She too is ruined: her lover and her father both died in the war, and the consequences of losing the latter have almost driven her mad. Hana no longer thinks about Canada, her homeland. To maintain a certain level of mental health, she focuses on her job as a nurse and her immediate environment. This environment is also indicative of his mental state; she and the other characters reside in Villa San Girolamo, a bombed-out villa in a deserted, war-torn landscape. This building is not safe: page 7 of the text specifies that in the villa, “certain rooms were not accessible because of the rubble. A bomb crater let the moon and rain into the downstairs library – where in one corner sat a constantly soaked armchair. And this open-air villa doesn't exactly give way to a landscape of lush Mediterranean beauty either; the countryside is literally rotting and the post-war smell of rotting flesh is constant. However, Hana finds comfort in the villa, in that the place is locationless. The English patient himself desires placelessness. Throughout the novel, we, the readers, gradually discover his identity. He worked before the war as a British cartographer, but effectively committed treason by using the knowledge he had gained as a cartographer to smuggle Axis soldiers across the desert. Almasy does not care about country borders or conflicts between them; to him, every place is like the desert in which he spent much of his life studying and living – so easily and so radically altered by the wind. He is so far removed from social constructs that he has no nation. And yet he is physically broken; so much so that his identity was burned. Could it be that the physical deformity that hides his physical identity reveals to the reader the gap in his mental identity, the space where an innate place of belonging should be found? How crucial is place to a person's state of being? Consider yet another..