Michael Ondaatje Tricks the Eye

Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and The Cat’s Table (2011), this chapter examines Ondaatje’s modernist, indeed Conradian, engagement with the unreliability of individual cognition and subjective impression. Ondaatje’s characters typically fail to recognize their view of the world depends on acts of “enframing.” Blindness to their situated perspectives leaves them vulnerable to political violence and social injustice, including colonialism and imperialism. The chapter argues that the modernist lesson is that perception is always a game of frames, so the eye needs to keep seeking the edge. The postcolonial lesson is that an eye that does not move becomes complicit with nationalism and empire building. Ondaatje’s efforts to look more closely at the hidden mechanisms that shape social life represent his attempt to apply the formal and thematic concerns of modernism to the politics of colonialism and the challenges of global modernity.