The English Patient

One of the novel’s central characters, the eponymous English patient is a badly burned man being cared for by Hana at the Villa San Girolamo. He suffers from amnesia and claims to have forgotten both his name and his nationality, but Caravaggio ultimately identifies him as Almásy, a Hungarian count and desert explorer. Much of the narratives consists of Almásy discussing with Hana his doomed romance with married Englishwoman Katharine Clifton, who, along with her husband Geoffrey, was part of the same North African exploration team as Almásy. Almásy’s only belonging is his worn copy of Herodotus’s Histories, into which he has inserted clippings from other texts as well as his own writing (See: Symbols & Motifs).

Almásy is notable for his love of the desert, believing it to be a place where one’s nationality does not matter. However, during World War II, he helped German spies navigate the route into Egypt, thus undermining his own belief that desert landscapes are fundamentally apolitical. He is wracked by guilt, both about his collaboration with the Nazis and about Katharine’s death, the latter of which occurred because British spies refused to help Almásy rescue her. However, he maintains that betrayals in war are much less important than betrayals in peace, which suggests that he elevates the personal above the political: This allows him to justify his efforts to aid the Germans, as he simply saw his love for Katharine as more important than any broader sociopolitical obligations.