Reading for the English Patient

Although The English Patient's preoccupation with reading and narrating (lives) has been widely acknowledged, its structure has been insufficiently linked with the mindscape of the characters. It is Peter Brooks's insights into the correspondences between the plot of our lives and the plots of the tales we tell that opens the way for reading (for) the novel's stories and lives as stories. Successfully interrelating psychoanalysis and literary theory, Brooks mainly relies on Sigmund Freud's ideas concerning the death drive and transference, something that proves particularly fruitful for analysing a novel in which the protagonist, the English patient, appears to be telling his defective life story to an analyst. It is a technique of reading that lays bare the relationship between the characters and the structure of the text, and their shared dynamic nature. Brooks's insights are made to interact with Julia Kristeva's ideas concerning the semiotic and symbolic dimensions of language and Lewis Hyde's reflections on the mythic figure of the trickster, as both critics are also - be it perhaps less blatantly - occupied with the endless stories we tell and live (in). © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Publication year:2010

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Authors from:Higher Education