While In The Skin of a Lion is about the immigrant laborers of the 1920s’ Toronto when foundation of industrialization was being laid in Canada, The English Patient is set during the World War II.

Ondaatje thus adds to the discourse as he challenges and revises the already narrated one to incorporate the other histories. The historical and the fictional get juxtaposed in his works even as Ondaatje attempts to create a narrative space where many stories/histories may enact/recreate/reinvent themselves. The paper discusses how in both the works Ondaatje frames the stories around actual historical events, yet at the same time his aim is to uncover the unwritten, hidden, ignored histories of the marginal characters. The paper in particular focuses attention on his two works, In the Skin of a Lion(1987) and The English Patient(1992). The present paper examines how Michael Ondaatje in his works explores the complex issues of identity and individual histories in the transnational/trans-cultural setting.

This paper examines the above aspects, proposing a reading of the novel that questions authenticity of the identification of the title character with the count Ladislaus de Almásy, usually taken for granted by the readers, critics and commentators of the novel. Exposing the contradictions between the human need for a stable ego, with a known and knowable past, and the desire to avoid limitations imposed by any kind of belonging, the novel brings out the impossibility of mapping of the self on the one hand, and on the other, is an example of brilliant literary deception, seeming to provide identification for its unnamable subject. By presenting a phenomenon of an amnesiac who still remembers the great narratives of knowledge and culture but not the personal narrative of identity, the novel demonstrates to what extent the individual creativity is based on repetition in not only purposeful artistic pursuit, but also and most importantly in the very forming of our self-conception. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje investigates in a profound way the myth of individual uniqueness, placing it alongside the concept of identity as a compilation of cultural notions, recycled and reinterpreted by each person, and therefore non-original by definition.

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