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6. Essays
1. Discuss the themes in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

Ondaatje presents the lives of the immigrants in 1900's as

the main theme. The immigrants played a large role in building
the city of Toronto. But their contributions in building the city's
bridge and the biggest waterworks were neglected in the City's
official history. He describes the labour of the settlers in Canada.
But they remain outsiders to mainstream society.

Language and lack of language is the biggest theme. Many

immigrants are without language gestures. They work hard.
They have to learn the English Language. They can speak only
in English. They are given English names. But since they do
not understand the language, they treat it numbers.
as They
wear masks as in the puppet-show. At the puppet-show, the
immigrants assumed the skins of wild animals. This is a
metaphor for mask or disguise.

The immigrants are without language. They work hard.

Patrick, though a native Canadian, he is isolated
by language in
his country, Laughter and tears are only
own
communication
They bring them closer to the people around them.
The immigrant workers must
lea English. The puppet-show
shows the frustration of the
immigrants. The puppets cannot
speak. The show is accused by the
police. The frustrated
immigrants pound fist on the floor. They
a
suffering in words. cannot express their
 35
The theme of
rich and
bridge and the
noor is also discussed. 1ne
tunnel builders do labour for a little
money. Tne
sUpervisors the project are paid a lot. The
of
labourers a
compared to animals. Caravaqaio
steals only from the rich. Alice
talks mostly against the rich.
She is the force behind Patrick's
later actions. After her
death, Patrick sets
a bomb in the ricn
men's hotel. He wants to
bomblast the waterworks to show the
anger of the poor
workers. The waterworks is called tne
Palace of Purification. But the
workers, who built it died o
various diseases like tuberculosis, arthritis and
rheumatism. The
workers in the
tannery always had the smell on them.
The mixture of reality and dream is shown. Patrick
remembers Alice after her death through real events,
memories and dream imagery. The Commisssioner Harris had
a dream of building waterworks. The powerful Harris sees his
dream as reality.

The theatre plays a big part in the story. Both Clara and
Alice are actresses. Alice is shown as a puppet in a show on
stage. The immigrants learn English by mimicking the actors
on stage.

Story-telling on and off the stage, is another theme.

Nicholas becomes a story-teller and narrates the story of how
he saved Alice as a nun. Patrick reads novels after his

helps him to forget his sorrow. Harris

separation from Clara. It
awake with stories, In the end,
defeats Patrick by keeping him
Hana. He narrates the whole
Patrick becomes a story-teller to
story to her.
 36

blindfolding,
blindness and sight occCurs
The theme of
Accidentally one
the game of blindfolding. nce
often. Patrick plays
Clara forcefully. This makes her decide to ave
he kicks

him. She goes to

Ambrose Small. The Iguana, Clara leaves
is blind. The tunnel workers work in the blindina
for Patrick,
the hotel. It is there, Patrick is
dark. In the end, Patrick bombs
reconnected with life.

2. Discuss Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion as a

Post-Modern fiction.
In literature, Post-Modernism rejects the traditional realism.

It favours various experimental forms. It gives importance to

fragmentation. There is a sense of lament, pessimism and
despair about the world. Post-Modernism rejects the
difference between 'high' and 'low' taste. It cares for
intertextuality and meta-fiction. It reduces the importance of
history. History is not a witness to what is happening and to
record the fact. The basic idea of
Post-Modernism is that it
is impossible to reach the truth.
In the Skin of a Lion fictionalizes the lives of the
immigrants who played a large role in the
buiiding of the city or
Toronto in the
early 1900's. But their
became a part of the official
contributions never
history. Patrick, after Alice's deatn,
 37
goes to libraries and finds out the fact that the immigrants do

not figure anywhere in the history. So to celebrate tne

immigrants, Ondaatje writes about them. He exposes the

migrant Condition. It is a novel about the wearing and

removal of tasks. It tells of the shedding of skin, the

transformations and translations of identity.

The plot has a number of true stories of the time. The fall or

a nun from a bridge, the disappearance of Ambrose Sma,

the political suppresion of police and the murder of the labour

union organizers are some of the historical facts retold in the

novel.

Ondaatje mixes various past tenses with the heroic present

of the
of Nicholas working in the bridge. The historical past
Nicholas's journey from Macedonia
Bridge, the human past of
and the immediate past of the fall of the nun. These together
'worker-hero', Nicholas
strike the major chord that is the
decentres history.
Temelcoff. Thus Ondaatje

Lewis. He is an explosive expert.

The protagonist is Patrick
heart after the separation from Clara and
He nurses a broken
But at the end, he meets Harris. This shows
the death of Alice.
and the
between the labour and the capital; workers
the conflict
each other.
dreamer. They are uncapable of distroying
 38

As Berger savs
Ondaatje has high regard to John Berger.
a
told as though it were the onlv
"Never again will a single story be
of Patrick, Hazen Lewis, Clara
one". Ondaatje presents the story
Cato, Caravaggio, Hana
Dickens, Nicholas Temelcoff, Alice Gull,
workers' struggle and the
and others. The heroic present of the
eternal present of love make things absolute.
There is intertextuality, where writing is haunted by the
writer. The novel is haunted by the visionaries and builders of
the modern city. Caravaggio was named after Michael Angelo,
an Italian painter. He painted the poor. Caravaggio is a thief
who steals from the rich.

Ondaatje stresses on meta-ficiton. It brings the reader out

of the dream of fiction to stress a point. Ondaatje creates
fragments of memory in Patrick and Alice. The moving out and
away from the story gives us the moments of beauty. The
character of Caravaggio and Hana figure in Ondaatje's
The English Patient too.

7.Paragraphs
1. Justify the title of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
The title of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
is taken from
the Epic of Gilagamesh. The first recorded
myth. It says:
The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when
to the
you have gone
earth I will let my hair
grow long for
wander through the wilderness in the your sake, I will
skin of a lion.
 9
The words
express that after a beloved has died, the per-
son will not grow hair
long. Patrick feels the grief of
twice. First, when Clara leaves separaior
him he becomes heart broken.
Alice enters his life
unexpectedly.
The title indicatesthat the novel deals with disguise
and masking. Alice comes to Patrick all of a
sudden in E
puppet-show. The puppet-show represents a series of masKS
and painted faces. At the
puppet-show, the immigrants assume
the skins of wild animals, This is a metaphor for masK or

disguise.
The whole
story narrates the lives of the immigrants in
1900's. They have lost their language, words and identity.

2. The life of Immigrants

The general theme of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion is the
lives of the immigrants. They played a large role in the
building of the city of Toronto in the early 1900's. But their
contributions have never become part of the city's official

history.
The immigrants formed three quarters of the population of
from Macedonia, Finland,
upper America. They are mostly
knew only labour and
lithurenia, Poland, Canada. They
olds. On an average they
darkness. They were 20 to 35 years
only three or four sentences of English.
 40

The immigrants worked in

making tunnels, tanneries, ac
labourers. All arrived in
dyers, water boys and hide-room
worked till six in the evening. The labour
morning darkness and
names. They remembered the
agent gave them all English
number.
strange foreign syllables like a
If the immigrants speak in any language other than English,
in public, they will be jailed. There are a hundred fences and
lawns between the rich and them. They all lived in Cypress
Street. The interactions among them gave them the strength of

something more than themselves.

By 1938, over 10,000 foreign-born workers had been sent

out from America. The immigrants built the bridge and the
famous water work of America. The opening function was on
18th October 1918. The official history, the articles and
illustrations depicted everything except the information on those
who actually built the bridge. The puppet-show and the illegal
gathering of the labourers demonstrate their struggle to voice
their suppression and oppression. It was a silent band, waiting
for the next act when they would be
required to play.
Influenced by Alice's thought and emotion
for the poor, Patrick
sets fire to Muskoka Hotel visited the
by rich. He put
was in
prison. After his release in
1938, the previous night of the
opening of the
waterworks, he goes with his
plan to set a
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blasting box. But

Commissioner Harris defuses it. Patrick hurt
his arm and inally settles with Clara and Hana as his adapted
daughter.

The novel focuses on the construction of two Toronto

landmarks, the Prince Edward Viaduct, knows as Bloor Street
Viaduct, and the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plank. The title of
the novel, In the Skin of a Lion depicts, how the immigrants
wander the wilderness in the skin of a lion.