The English Patient (Characters)

Characters

Count Ladislaus de Almásy

See The English Patient

David Caravaggio

A middle-aged Canadian of Italian descent, Caravaggio, who was a professional burglar in Toronto, had joined the war effort as a spy for the Allies in Italy. He is an old friend of Hana's father, and when he hears that she is staying in an abandoned villa with a burn patient, he joins her there after his release from the hospital. His thumbs had been cut off while he was held captive and tortured by the Germans immediately prior to their retreat from Italy. He has developed an addiction to morphine.

Caravaggio, like the patient, represents a father figure to Hana. He is concerned about her health and safety and often tries to convince her to leave the abandoned villa. Hana remembers him as having been a gregarious and confident man, but the war and the torture have broken his spirit. He and Hana often sadly reminisce about their lives in Toronto before the war. Caravaggio is also a sort of a nemesis to the patient, as he is obsessed with the patient's true identity: he believes that the patient is not an Englishman but a spy who worked for the Germans. Because of his obsession with the patient's identity, he drugs him again and again into lucid hallucinations in order to pry his story from him. By the end, however, the patient's tragic story has removed any trace of Caravaggio's anger towards him.

In a novel that takes the futility of war on as a major theme, Caravaggio is a personification of this futility. As well as being the most vocal about his disdain for the war and its waste, his maimed hands are both evidence and symbols of its futility.

Geoffrey Clifton

An Englishman of high social standing, Geoffrey Clifton joins Almásy, Madox, and the rest of the Geographical Society desert expedition during the last days of his honeymoon with his new wife Katharine. He is a pilot with a good-natured personality; his wife is the apple of his eye, and he constantly boasts to the company of her beauty. It is later revealed that Clifton is a spy for the English government, keeping tabs on the international band of desert explorers.

Although Almásy and Katharine attempt to keep their affair a secret, Clifton eventually learns of the affair. On a trip back to the desert to retrieve Almásy, Clifton attempts to crash his plane into him; he misses Almásy but kills himself and mortally wounds Katharine.

Katharine Clifton

Fifteen years his junior, Katharine Clifton becomes Almásy's lover for a relatively brief and turbulent time. They had become acquainted during the Geographical Society expeditions in the Libyan desert, which Katharine's husband took her to during the last days of their honeymoon. She becomes enamored with the desert, and her growing interest in the desert is matched by her growing interest in Almásy, who is also secretly falling in love with her. She initiates the secret, and often somewhat violent, sexual affair, but the pressure of keeping it secret, coupled with her guilt, causes her to break it off — a move that breaks Almásy's heart, though he would not admit it to her.

When Clifton crashes his plane into the desert in an attempt to kill Almásy, he kills himself and mortally wounds Katharine. Almásy leaves her in a cave while he goes for help; she dies when he is unable to return to her. Katharine's death is the patient's greatest source of anguish. His inability to save her is the ultimate reason he renounces his identity.

The English Patient

The identity of the English patient is the crux of the mystery at the heart of this novel; his identity remains somewhat ambiguous even to the end of the novel. Burned beyond recognition, the patient is introduced to the young Canadian nurse, Hana, in an Italian hospital. She stays on with him at an abandoned Italian villa after her hospital regiment moves on. Through several fragments of his mostly hallucinatory monologues that pepper the novel, it is revealed that this patient, whom everyone believes to be an Englishman, was part of a Geographical Society expedition to map the Libyan desert. During his time in the desert, he meets and falls in love with Katharine Clifton, the young wife of his colleague Geoffrey Clifton. They commence a violent affair and break it off, only to have Clifton, in a fit of jealousy, attempt to kill them both by crashing his plane in the desert. Clifton is killed, and the patient leaves the severely injured Katharine in a desert cave until he can return with help. By this time, World War II has broken out, and he is captured by the English, who assume he is a spy for the Germans. He is unable to save Katharine. Two years go by before he is able to return to the cave and retrieve Katharine's body.

The patient was kept from saving Katharine because, by virtue of his name, the English assumed he was allied with the Germans. That he is thought to be an enemy by the British because of his non-Anglo name is the root of the patient's refusal to identify himself or align himself with any nation. The patient is a man of great historical and geographical knowledge, and a great passion for the desert. Both the death of his friend Madox and the death of Katharine cause him enough anguish to not be able to face his memories, except in the stupor of the morphine injections that Caravaggio administers.

Hana

Twenty-year-old Hana is originally from Toronto and was sent to Italy with the Canadian army as a nurse. The overwhelming trauma she experiences and witnesses during the war leaves her severely scarred emotionally: the experience of caring for scores of dying soldiers; receiving news of her father's death in France; becoming pregnant and having to terminate the pregnancy all leave her scarred. While working in an abandoned villa that has been transformed into a hospital, she meets a patient who is burned beyond recognition. When her regiment moves on, Hana remains at the villa alone with the patient. Later, she is joined by David Caravaggio and Kip the sapper, with whom she eventually develops an intimate relationship.

Hana idealizes her patient; she finds a fatherly type of comfort with him and regards him as a "despairing saint." Her idealism, in spite of her emotional anguish, is evident in her attitude towards nationalism and race; when Caravaggio questions whether the patient is English or is in league with Germany, Hana states that it does not matter what side he is on. Hana also idealizes Kip, whom she is drawn to for comfort and whom she also regards as a sort of saint. Her observations of him reveal an adoration of his beauty; however, her mild obsession with the brownness of his skin and with his long, dark hair seems to have more to do with a universal idea of beauty and less to do with their difference in race.

Unfortunately, Hana's idealism did not affect Kip, who left her ultimately because she, as a Canadian, is associated with the West and with what he comes to regard as its violent racist policies against non-Western cultures.

Hana does, at the end of the book, achieve a catharsis that none of the other characters seem to: she writes a letter to her stepmother, Clara, informing her of the details of her father's death and discussing, for the first time, her own grief. Finally able to openly acknowledge her father's death, Hana achieves an emotional healing.

Hardy

Hardy is an Englishman and a member of Kip's sapper regiment in Italy. Unlike the other English sappers, who are reluctant to show the senior-ranking Sikh respect because of his race, Hardy is enthusiastic in following Kip's orders. Kip and Hardy form a friendship. Hardy is killed while attempting to defuse a bomb. His sudden death is an indirect factor that propels Kip towards starting a romantic relationship with Hana.

Mr. Fred Harts

Fred Harts is Lord Suffolk's chauffeur and constant companion in his bomb disposal work. Together with Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden, the threesome is known as the Holy Trinity. Mr. Harts is killed along with Suffolk and Morden while defusing a bomb in 1941.

Kip

See Kirpal Singh

Madox

An Englishman and a member of the Geographical Society, Madox is Almásy's closest friend, having spent ten years charting the African deserts with him. The Geographical Society, an international band of explorers stationed in the desert and away from the political tensions of Europe, seems to transcend the boundaries of nationalism. The group is disbanded because of the commencement of World War II, which sadly transforms the desert into a war zone. Madox returns to England and ends up committing suicide. The patient, heartbroken at his friend's death, says that Madox "died because of nations."

Miss Morden

Miss Morden is secretary to Lord Suffolk and accompanies him during every bomb dismantlement. When Lord Suffolk chooses Kip to join his sapper regiment, Miss Morden becomes the only English woman to truly befriend Kip. He cherishes her friendship and views her as a sort of mother figure; she takes him to plays and, during one touching instant, daubs him with cologne to calm him during a bomb disposal. Her death by explosion, along with Fred Harts and Lord Suffolk, is a great source of anguish to Kip.

Kirpal Singh

Kirpal (Kip) Singh, as a sapper in the British army, is part of an elite and unique unit hand-selected and trained in bomb disposal. It is extremely technical and dangerous work. Kip is a Sikh originally from India, which is a colony of Britain at the time the novel takes place. His vehemently anti-British brother is jailed for refusing to join the British army; Kip joins in his place and is sent to London. He acquires his nickname, Kip (which he is called throughout most of the novel), from the British soldiers who derived his name from some kipper grease that got on some of his reports.

Kip faces discrimination in the army that, while it allows him to be a soldier, disbars him from social activities; that is, until he is befriended by his mentor in the sapper unit, Lord Suffolk, and his assistants, Miss Morden and Mr. Harts. Kip becomes Lord Suffolk's right-hand sapper, and he regards Lord Suffolk as a father figure. Indeed, Kip values these three English people as though they were family, and he is emotionally shattered when they are suddenly blown up by a bomb. Rather than facing his anguish at their deaths, he tucks away their memories — an act he compares to Peter Pan packing away his shadow — and heads to Italy with another sapper unit. Here, he encounters Hana, with whom he commences a romantic relationship, and the patient, with whom he forms a fast friendship, based on their similarities in taste, knowledge, and personality.

During his time in Europe, Kip falls in love with Western culture, especially that of the English. He constantly hums the Western tunes he learns through his portable radio headset; he adores English tea and condensed milk; later, in Italy, he finds himself in awe of the vast frescoes of the churches.

In the meantime, Kip's own non-white racial background is a constant factor in his relationship to the European world he now inhabits; his race is represented especially by the constant repetition throughout the text of the description of his "brown skin." The consciousness of his color is ever-present and represents his racial difference as a significant factor in his life — even during the intense, life-and-death moments of bomb disposal.

The character of Kip is very much a mirror of the character of the patient: the patient himself often refers to Kip as a younger version of himself. He also refers to the both of them as "international bastards," based on their life experience of straddling different national and ethnic cultures, seeming to not be bound in spirit by the tenets of just one 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 Kip's previous idealization of the West, Europe, and especially the Britain; it makes clear to him the exploitation by these colonial nations of the non-Western peoples of the world. His explosive anger at the Americans' celebration of the nuclear bombing of Japanese civilians, and his subsequent, very sudden exit from both the villa and from Hana's life, forms the climax of the novel.

Lord Suffolk

Lord Suffolk, an English gentleman, is the head of an experimental bomb disposal unit as part of the British Army. He chooses Kip as a member of his elite sapper unit; Kip eventually becomes his top sapper. Lord Suffolk, along with his constant work companions Miss Morden, his secretary, and Mr. Fred Harts, his chauffeur, are known as The Holy Trinity. Kip becomes especially close to Lord Suffolk who, as his mentor, becomes a father figure to Kip. Lord Suffolk is killed in 1941 by a bomb, and his sudden death is a great source of sadness for Kip.