The English Patient | Characters

More so than any other character, Hana is presented to us almost exclusively in the present. We learn very little of her youth and are given only a few glimpses of her recent past as a war nurse. Yet we constantly sense that this young woman, "half adult, half child," has been powerfully affected by the carnage of the war. Her understaffed, overworked unit followed in the wake of the battles. As "the thermometer of blood moved up the country" the "destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnelers in the dark." The constant presence of death forces...

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