Who we are depends on our origins. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay This is a common thread in the human experience; our backgrounds give way to our personalities. But what happens when a person disagrees with their nation's boundaries on their identity? Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient explores what happens when a person attempts to break away from the mold of a homeland and raises the question of whether or not misfits can find a place that is truly nationless, from which to carve out their own identity. at the end of World War II, the novel describes a time when nationalistic tensions are high across the world. There is, in fact, a heightened sense of national responsibility. Yet, the novel's main characters all try to escape him. Hana, a young war nurse, is from Canada. However, instead of moving forward through Italy with the rest of the nurses and Canadian infantry, she chooses to stay behind and care for a single, unnamed man, whom she simply refers to as the English Patient. This man is called "his desperate saint" and as he cleans his naked, ruined body, he imagines that he has the "hip bones of Christ" (page 3). It's clear that she not only cares for 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 impact of the latter's loss has almost driven her mad. Hana no longer thinks about Canada, her homeland. To maintain a certain level of sanity, she focuses on her work as a nurse and her surroundings. That 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 unsafe: on page 7 of the text we read that in the villa "it was not possible to enter some rooms due to the rubble. A bomb crater allowed the moon and rain to enter the downstairs library, where there was a permanently wet armchair in one corner. And this open-air villa isn't even giving way to a landscape of lush Mediterranean beauty; the countryside is literally rotting and the post-war smell of rotting flesh is constant. However, Hana finds comfort in the mansion, as the place is, well, placeless. The English patient himself longs for placelessness. Over the course of the novel we readers slowly discover his identity. Before the war he worked as a British cartographer, but effectively committed treason when he used the knowledge he learned as a cartographer to smuggle Axis soldiers across the desert. Almasy is not concerned with the borders of countries or the fights between them; for him, every place is like the desert in which he spent much of his life studying and living, so easily and dramatically altered by the wind. It is so far removed from the constructs of society that it has no nation. Yet he is physically destroyed; 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 fracture in his mind, the space where an innate place of belonging should be found? How crucial is place to one's state of being? Let's consider yet another character, Kip. Kip is a Sikh Indian who worked as a sapper during the war. He had the dangerous task of dismantling unexploded mines. Kip's decision to join the British Army.