Critically analyse The English Patient as a modernist novel.

In an Interview with Eleanor Wachtel published in. the Summer 1994 number of Essays on ~anadian Writing (25 1) Ondaatje stated that he originally thought that The English Patient was going to be a contemporary book set entirely in that one period of the Second World War.

He told the interviewer that once he got into the desert stuff, and through that, to Herodotus, he began picking up a sense of the layers of history. He then found himself going back deeper and deeper in time. He added that a special sense of history of the building overlaid with building was (perhaps unconsciously) central in the mind. He also added that all this had to do with unearthing history.