Critically analyse The English Patient as a modernist novel.

There are strong similarities between Joseph Conrad’s 1900 novella Heart of Darkness and Ondaatje’s The English Patient. For one thing, the narrative is a framed narrative. There is an indirect but unmistakable reliance on the broad steam-of consciousness approach in the matter of time, memory and telling.

In that sense, the Ondaatje text has in it a lot of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Most things and happenings are filtered through memory. History’s layers keep getting unearthed progressively.