Intertextual reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje develops the novel The English Patient in the form of intertextual relationship with Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. He has used the intertextual form of writing the novel to counter the discourse of the colonizers as formed by Kipling in Kim. Kipling presents his title character Kim in highly positive light. Kipling seeks to prove his reader the authenticity and essentialism of colonization through the novel. Whereas Ondaatje depicts a literary mosaic, a non linear form, projecting glimpses from the perspective of post colonialism. For that he takes the literary elements such as theme, image, characterization, history, and excerpt from the Kipling’s novel. He focuses on the fragmented-traumatic life and condition of the ex-colonized characters who have worked in favor of the English in the Second World War. Though both of writers are different in viewing the issue of colonization, Ondaatje establishes the ground of the novel in the intertextual connection with Kipling’s Kim.