The English Patient Characters
The main characters in The English Patient are Count Laszlo de Almásy, Katherine Clifton, Geoffrey Clifton, Hana, Kip Singh, and David Caravaggio.
- Count Laszlo de Almásy is the titular English Patient, who is arrested under suspicion of being a German spy.
- Katherine Clifton is Almásy's married lover.
- Geoffrey Clifton is Katherine's husband, who tries to kill Katherine and Almásy after learning of their affair.
- Hana is Almásy's nurse.
- Kirpal "Kip" Singh is a Sikh in the British Army, who has an affair with Hana.
- David Caravaggio is a friend of Hana's father. He's obsessed with learning the English Patient's true identity.
The Characters
Several of The English Patient’s characters (Hana, Caravaggio, and Hana’s stepmother Clara, to whom Hana writes letters) have appeared earlier in Ondaatje’s novel about Toronto laborers, Skin of a Lion (1987). Several others are based loosely on historical figures: the English patient on the real Almásy, a Hungarian explorer of mysterious ancestry who seems to have aided the Germans in World War II and who died in 1951; and Geoffrey Clifton on Sir Robert Clayton East Clayton, a British aristocrat and geographer who participated in a Libyan Desert exploration with Almásy in 1931 and 1932, shortly after his marriage to sculptor and pilot Dorothy Mary Durrant (the novel’s Katharine Clifton). Lord Clayton East Clayton died of a respiratory disease in 1932, and his wife died alone in a plane crash in Great Britain in 1933. Although Count de Almásy and Lady Clayton East Clayton certainly knew each other, there seems no evidence of an affair between them.
Ondaatje develops his fictional characters through flashbacks into their pasts; excerpts from books they read to the English patient; snatches of lyrics from World War II songs; entries from Almásy’s journal; and pieces of Hana’s letters to her stepmother Clara in Canada—the debris of their lives. The characters seldom exist in the present moment alone; they move in and out of the past, in and out of Italy, and in and out of World War II.
Further, as their stories converge, Ondaatje stresses the physical and emotional wounds of war that have brought them together. Almásy is dying of the burns that cover his body—and of heartbreak over the loss of the woman he loved. Caravaggio, having lost his thumbs when the Germans tortured him as a spy, has also lost the confidence that made him a thief before the war and a spy for the Allies during World War II. Kip has lost his British mentors, many sapper colleagues, and finally, his sergeant, the Englishman Sam Hardy. Hana, too, has lost everyone she loves: her father, her lover, her aborted child. All the characters have lost their homelands, their safety, and their innocence.
Coming from many cultures, they have formed a multicultural community in this Italian villa, just as Almásy has been part of an international Geographic Society exploration of the Libyan Desert before the war ended their work. At the close of the war, these individuals once more cross national boundaries and set aside cultural differences by trying to understand, listen to, and comfort one another. Hana and Kip begin to heal again in each other’s company. Caravaggio undergoes a dramatic reversal: Having heard Count de Almásy’s story, he no longer wants to kill Almásy in retaliation for his lost thumbs. Instead, he defends and protects Almásy from Kip’s anger after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although he hugs Kip in parting as well.
At the end of the novel and the end of the war, each character moves in a separate direction once more. Kip goes back to India; Hana returns to Canada after fulfilling the English patient’s desire to die by giving him an overdose of morphine; all leave the Villa San Girolamo behind them.
Characters
Hana, more than any other character, is depicted almost entirely in the present. We know very little about her childhood and only catch brief glimpses of her recent past as a war nurse. Despite this, it is evident that this young woman, described as "half adult, half child," has been deeply impacted by the horrors of war. Her...
(This entire section contains 1307 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
understaffed and overburdened unit followed closely behind 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." Constant exposure to death forces her to toughen up. When Caravaggio reminds her of her younger self, "the cocky sixteen-year-old," Hana wonders aloud, "I wonder what happened to her." She desires for "Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate" than before. To Caravaggio, she admits, "I know death now, David. I know all the smells." At one point, utterly exhausted after three days and nights without sleep, she "lay down on the floor beside a mattress where someone lay dead and slept for twelve hours, closing her eyes against the world around her." Upon waking, she cuts off her hair and returns to her duties. She doesn't break down until she receives a note informing her of her father's death.
Her interactions with the three men at the villa provide our initial—and in some ways, defining—impressions of them. Shortly after her father's death, Hana encounters the English patient, "someone who looked like a burned animal, taut and dark, a pool for her." Despite knowing nothing about him, not even his name, she feels that "there was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult." She refers to him as "a despairing saint." She reads to him, anesthetizes him, feeds and bathes him, all without curiosity about his past.
However, her patient's history is of utmost importance to her father's old friend, Caravaggio. He suspects that the unidentified man lying in the bed upstairs might be the notorious German spy, Count Ladislaus de Almasy from Hungary. Caravaggio, who was a thief before the war, was recruited by Allied Intelligence to assist in monitoring the Germans. He was captured, had his thumbs severed, and, towards the end of the war, arrived at the nearly deserted villa to look after an old friend's daughter. Hana senses his intentions and welcomes him into her secluded world: "She thought about Caravaggio—some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company." A morphine addict, crippled both physically and emotionally, Caravaggio exemplifies the war's toll and the enduring power of old bonds. Much of his time in the book is spent trying to extract the truth from the mysterious, unidentified burned patient using morphine and alcohol. By the story's conclusion, wartime loyalties become insignificant compared to personal loves and losses. Caravaggio, and possibly the reader, eventually accept what Hana, with wisdom and tenderness beyond her years, had told him earlier: "I think we should leave him be. It doesn't matter what side he was on, does it?"
The burned patient symbolizes different things for each of the other characters. For Hana, he embodies the war's victim, channeling her numbed emotions and sense of loss. She often thinks of her deceased father while caring for him. For Caravaggio, he represents a mystery, a piece of the larger wartime puzzle. For Kip, he is a source of stories, "a reservoir of information." To the West, he is a spy; to the Germans, he is a crucial asset in their desert campaign. His friend Maddox viewed him as a trusted fellow explorer; Katherine Clifton saw him as a man of passion; her husband considered him a personal betrayer. He remains somewhat enigmatic throughout, with his connection to the past and the desert emphasizing his isolation from society. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that his relationship with a young woman in the desert draws him into an emotional whirlpool more potent than national identity or idealism.
In the portrayal of Kirpal Singh, a twenty-six-year-old sapper, Ondaatje masterfully illustrates the peril, bravery, and irony inherent in war. Far from his native India, the young soldier volunteers to join Lord Suffolk's bomb disposal team. His natural skill with machinery gives him a sense of duty, while his role as a sapper grants him a measure of independence. He spends his days locating and defusing bombs in and around the villa, as well as scouring the countryside for the thousands of bombs hidden or buried by the retreating German army. Notably, he sets up his tent just outside the villa, symbolizing his connection to and separation from the group. Similar to the English patient (and perhaps anyone who has experienced war), he embodies two worlds. He delicately balances Indian and English customs and values, a balance he maintains until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the novel's conclusion.
Before Kip's arrival, Hana could withdraw into herself despite the presence of the two men: gardening, reading, setting up her hammock wherever she wished. "She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant planets, each in his own sphere of memory and solitude." However, Kip touches something within her. She finds herself observing him, admiring him, and reaching out to him. She regards him as a "warrior saint," someone who selflessly protects them yet remains somewhat apart, inward, and nonjudgmental. She feels that "he has mapped her sadness more than any other."
Yet, they both recognize that he "has grown up an outsider." Even as she spends nights with him in his tent, she understands that his "self-sufficiency and privacy" are fundamental to him, partly due to being "an anonymous member of another race, a part of an invisible world." This sense of otherness is profoundly illustrated in his dramatic reaction to the news that the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. The magnitude of the devastation and the human toll are overwhelming for him to grasp. "When he closes his eyes he sees fire, people leaping into reservoirs to escape flames or heat that in seconds incinerates everything—what they hold, their own skin and hair, even the water they leap into." The fragile bridge between cultures has been shattered. He can no longer serve as a guardian for Europe.
An equally compelling and influential element of the novel, on par with its four characters, is the desert itself. Some of the most mesmerizing and evocative sections of the book are dedicated to illustrating the mystery and power of these uncharted sands on the English patient and his fellow explorers, during the years before the area became a "theater of war." Time and again, we are presented with glimpses of this "vast and silent pocket of the earth," teeming with lost civilizations and untold secrets; "in the emptiness of deserts you are always surrounded by lost history." Through his morphine-induced flashbacks and musings, we perceive the English patient's deep connection to the silence and solitude of the desert, his yearning to escape society, to "walk upon such an earth that had no maps." He acknowledges that "everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert." The desert, like the love he discovered there, was alluring, beautiful ("a trompe l'oeil of time and water") and perilous: "It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbour of oasis." Additionally, much like love, "the desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names . . . ."
Characters
David Caravaggio
David Caravaggio, a middle-aged Canadian with Italian heritage, was a skilled burglar in Toronto before joining the war effort as a spy for the Allies in Italy. An old acquaintance of Hana's father, he decides to join Hana in an abandoned villa after learning she is caring for a burn patient there. Caravaggio had been captured and tortured by the Germans, who cut off his thumbs just before they retreated from Italy. As a result of his trauma, he developed a dependency on morphine.
Caravaggio serves as a paternal figure to Hana, much like the patient. He is deeply concerned about her well-being and frequently urges her to leave the desolate villa. Hana recalls him as a lively and self-assured man, but the war and subsequent torture have left him a broken shell of his former self. Together, they often wistfully remember their pre-war lives in Toronto. Caravaggio is also somewhat antagonistic towards the patient, fixated on uncovering his true identity. He suspects the patient is not an Englishman but a German spy. This obsession drives Caravaggio to repeatedly drug the patient, inducing vivid hallucinations to extract his story. Ultimately, the patient's harrowing tale dissipates Caravaggio's animosity towards him.
In a novel that tackles the theme of war's futility, Caravaggio embodies this concept. He is the most outspoken about his contempt for the war and its senseless waste. His mutilated hands serve both as proof and a symbol of this futility.
Geoffrey Clifton
Geoffrey Clifton, an Englishman of high social status, joins Almásy, Madox, and the rest of the Geographical Society's desert expedition during the final days of his honeymoon with his new wife, Katharine. A pilot with a cheerful disposition, he constantly praises his wife's beauty to the group. It is eventually revealed that Clifton is an English government spy, monitoring the international group of desert explorers.
Despite Almásy and Katharine's attempts to conceal their affair, Clifton eventually discovers the truth. During a return trip to the desert to pick up Almásy, Clifton tries to crash his plane into him. Although he misses Almásy, he ends up killing himself and fatally injuring Katharine.
Katharine Clifton
Katharine Clifton, fifteen years younger than Almásy, becomes his lover for a brief and tumultuous period. They meet during the Geographical Society expeditions in the Libyan desert, which Katharine's husband brings her to at the end of their honeymoon. Katharine develops a fascination with the desert, paralleling her growing interest in Almásy, who is also secretly falling for her. She initiates a secretive and often intense sexual affair, but the strain of secrecy and her guilt lead her to end it—a decision that deeply hurts Almásy, though he never admits it to her.
When Clifton crashes his plane in the desert in an attempt to kill Almásy, he ends up killing himself and fatally injuring Katharine. Almásy leaves her in a cave while he seeks help; she dies when he fails to return. Katharine's death is the patient's deepest source of sorrow. His inability to save her is the primary reason he renounces his identity.
The English Patient
The mystery of the English patient's identity is central to the novel and remains somewhat unclear even by the end. Severely burned and unrecognizable, the patient is introduced to Hana, a young Canadian nurse, in an Italian hospital. She stays with him in an abandoned Italian villa after her hospital unit departs. Through fragmented, often hallucinatory monologues, it is revealed that the patient, presumed to be English, was part of a Geographical Society expedition mapping the Libyan desert. During this time, he meets and falls in love with Katharine Clifton, the young wife of his colleague Geoffrey Clifton. They begin a passionate affair, which they eventually end. In a jealous rage, Clifton attempts to kill them both by crashing his plane in the desert. Clifton dies, and the patient leaves the gravely injured Katharine in a desert cave, intending to return with help. However, World War II breaks out, and he is captured by the English, who suspect him of being a German spy. Unable to save Katharine, two years pass before he can return to the cave to retrieve her body.
The patient was unable to save Katharine because the English assumed, based on his name, that he was allied with the Germans. The British suspicion of him due to his non-Anglo name is the primary reason he refuses to identify or align himself with any nation. He possesses extensive historical and geographical knowledge and has a profound passion for the desert. The deaths of his friend Madox and Katharine cause him immense pain, leaving him unable to confront his memories except under the influence of the morphine injections administered by Caravaggio.
Hana
Hana, a twenty-year-old from Toronto, was deployed to Italy with the Canadian army as a nurse. The intense trauma she experiences and witnesses during the war leaves her deeply emotionally scarred: tending to numerous dying soldiers, learning of her father's death in France, and undergoing a pregnancy termination all take a heavy toll on her. While working in an abandoned villa converted into a hospital, she meets a patient who is burned beyond recognition. When her regiment moves on, Hana stays behind at the villa alone with the patient. Later, she is joined by David Caravaggio and Kip the sapper, with whom she eventually forms an intimate relationship.
Hana idealizes her patient; she finds a fatherly comfort in him and sees him as a "despairing saint." Despite her emotional pain, her idealism is evident in her views on nationalism and race. When Caravaggio questions whether the patient is English or allied with Germany, Hana insists that it does not matter what side he is on. She also idealizes Kip, finding comfort in him and viewing him as another kind of saint. Her admiration for him reveals an adoration of his beauty; however, her fascination with the color of his skin and his long, dark hair seems more connected to a universal concept of beauty rather than their racial differences.
Sadly, Hana's idealism does not impact Kip, who ultimately leaves her because, as a Canadian, she is linked to the West and its violent, racist policies against non-Western cultures.
By the end of the book, Hana achieves a catharsis that eludes the other characters: she writes a letter to her stepmother, Clara, detailing her father's death and discussing her own grief for the first time. By openly acknowledging her father's death, Hana attains emotional healing.
Hardy
Hardy, an Englishman, is a member of Kip's sapper regiment in Italy. Unlike the other English sappers, who hesitate to show respect to the senior-ranking Sikh due to his race, Hardy eagerly follows Kip's orders. Kip and Hardy develop a friendship. Hardy is tragically killed while attempting to defuse a bomb. His unexpected death indirectly influences Kip to begin a romantic relationship with Hana.
Mr. Fred Harts
Fred Harts serves as Lord Suffolk's chauffeur and constant companion in bomb disposal operations. Along with Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden, they are collectively known as the Holy Trinity. Mr. Harts loses his life alongside Suffolk and Morden while defusing a bomb in 1941.
Kip
See Kirpal Singh
Madox
Madox, an Englishman and a member of the Geographical Society, is Almásy's closest friend, having spent a decade mapping the African deserts with him. The Geographical Society, an international group of explorers stationed in the desert, remains detached from the political tensions of Europe and transcends national boundaries. However, the onset of World War II leads to the group's disbandment, transforming the desert into a war zone. Madox returns to England and ultimately takes his own life. The patient, deeply saddened by his friend's death, remarks that Madox "died because of nations."
Miss Morden
Miss Morden, Lord Suffolk's secretary, accompanies him during every bomb dismantlement. When Lord Suffolk selects Kip for his sapper regiment, Miss Morden becomes the only English woman to truly befriend Kip. He treasures her friendship and views her as a mother figure; she takes him to plays and, in a touching moment, applies cologne to calm him during a bomb disposal. Her death in an explosion, along with Fred Harts and Lord Suffolk, causes Kip great sorrow.
Kirpal Singh
Kirpal (Kip) Singh, a sapper in the British army, belongs to an elite unit specially selected and trained in bomb disposal. This work is highly technical and perilous. Kip, a Sikh from India, which is a British colony at the time the novel is set, has a brother who is vehemently anti-British and imprisoned for refusing to join the British army. Kip enlists in his brother's place and is sent to London. He earns the nickname Kip (used throughout most of the novel) from British soldiers who derived it from some kipper grease that stained his reports.
Kip experiences discrimination in the army that, while allowing him to serve as a soldier, excludes him from social events. This changes when he befriends his mentor in the sapper unit, Lord Suffolk, along with Suffolk's assistants, Miss Morden and Mr. Harts. Kip becomes Lord Suffolk's trusted sapper and sees him as a father figure. He deeply values these three English individuals as family, and their sudden death in a bomb explosion devastates him emotionally. Instead of confronting his grief, Kip suppresses their memories—likening it to Peter Pan stowing away his shadow—and moves to Italy with another sapper unit. There, he meets Hana, with whom he starts a romantic relationship, and the patient, with whom he forms a strong friendship based on shared tastes, knowledge, and personalities.
While in Europe, Kip develops a fondness for Western culture, particularly English traditions. He frequently hums Western tunes he picks up through his portable radio headset, enjoys English tea and condensed milk, and is captivated by the grand frescoes in Italian churches.
However, Kip's non-white racial background consistently influences his relationship with the European world he inhabits. His race is notably highlighted by the frequent mention of his "brown skin" throughout the text. This awareness of his skin color underscores his racial difference as a significant aspect of his life, even during the intense, life-threatening moments involved in bomb disposal.
Kip's character mirrors that of the patient: the patient often refers to Kip as a younger version of himself. He also describes both of them as "international bastards," reflecting their experiences of navigating multiple national and ethnic cultures, seemingly unbound by a single national identity. However, for Kip, the patient's idealized "international" identity is shattered by the American bombing of Hiroshima. This act of violence by what Kip calls a "white nation" against a "brown nation" destroys his previous admiration for the West, Europe, and especially Britain. It makes him acutely aware of the exploitation by colonial nations of non-Western peoples. Kip's explosive anger at the Americans' celebration of the nuclear bombing of Japanese civilians, and his sudden departure from both the villa and Hana's life, marks the climax of the novel.
Lord Suffolk
Lord Suffolk, an English nobleman, leads an experimental bomb disposal unit within the British Army. He selects Kip to join his elite sapper team, where Kip eventually rises to become the top sapper. Lord Suffolk works closely with Miss Morden, his secretary, and Mr. Fred Harts, his chauffeur; together, they are referred to as The Holy Trinity. Kip forms a particularly strong bond with Lord Suffolk, who becomes a father figure and mentor to him. Tragically, in 1941, Lord Suffolk is killed by a bomb, leaving Kip deeply saddened by his sudden loss.