In the Skin of a Lion

The most beautiful passage ,,

I find the most beautiful passages in this book to be the ones where it talks about Patrick's past. Readers find out about Patrick and his youth through flashbacks and these flashbacks present the reader with quite a different feeling than when reading about the bridge and the dynamites, etc. Nonetheless, the particular passage I find particularly unique is from pages 21 to 22.
This passage demonstrates freedom of the workers. A metaphor that stood out to me was “This was against the night” (22). This covers the setting of this passage as nighttime. This also emphasizes the imagery and contrast of light vs. darkness, and that contrast is what makes this passage significant. “But even to the boy of eleven, deep in the woods after midnight, this was obviously benign. Something joyous. A gift.” (21).The fact the loggers were skating in the dark (when they were supposed to be ‘resting’) showed Patrick that they were pretty much bending the rules; contrary to what he had been taught or knew. The portrayal of these loggers as “they raced, swerved, fell and rolled on the ice” created desire for Patrick, something new. These phrases demonstrate the sort of freedom the workers (loggers) had, of course, on the ice. It was a time for replenishing the soul through laughter and spirit. As aforementioned, Patrick desired to join them. He found their simple and joyous play so welcoming and full of opportunities; "Their lanterns replaced with new rushes which let them go further past boundaries, speed! romance! one man waltzing with his fire. . . ." This passage, full of imagery and symbolism makes it very poetic. One can imagine just how much fun the loggers were having and it almost makes the reader want to join as much as Patrick had desired. This is what Patrick had wanted; “He longed to hold their hands and skate the length of the creek…” (21). This passage is truly one that evokes a lot of imagery. Ondaatje chooses to let this scene come alive through his style and diction and this adds to the magical freedom depicted in this passage.

The character and I

The character that I find myself identifying with most is Alice. Moreover, I do believe that pathos is exactly the element of this response. Pathos appeals to my emotions and this is how I relate to Alice; emotionally. I find connections between Alice and me when it comes to characterization. In my opinion, Ondaatje portrays Alice as a pretty ‘strong-but-weak’ character. The story depicts Alice as a vulnerable and delicate character. In the beginning of the book, the fact that the author presents to the reader Alice as a nun shows what kind of character she is. Then, when she falls off the bridge and Nicholas Temelcoff saves her, her delicacy shown evidently. Personally, however, I would have thought that anyone who was a nun was anything but feeble and delicate. After all, the reason why people become nuns is because they set their heart to one thing, one God and nothing other. Even so, Alice is reluctant to share about her past – with Clara and Patrick – as a nun and etc. This may be because she desires to let go of her past and the anxiety that was twisted around it.

On the other hand, Alice is actually multi-skinned. Meaning, there are actually two ‘sides’ to Alice. One side is her weak side, but the other is quite the contrary. It’s like she has different skins. As mentioned on page 153, Patrick describes his uncertainty with Alice; “…he can never conceive how she leaps from her true self to her other true self.” Alice as a performer also reveals the strong-willed aspect of her character because it is through her performances that Patrick finds more clues about who she really is. Likewise, for her, that was her identity that she strongly held onto and she wouldn’t be finding other ways to get rid of it, “She would not be bossed and she was self-sufficient” (137).

As for me, I couldn’t help but find pieces of me woven through Alice. There are times when I find myself as weak and delicate as the nun portrayed on the bridge but then there is also another side of me that says I have a different sort of ‘power’ within me that I am still in the need of ‘awakening’. For Alice it was for ‘the plight of the immigrant workers’. For me, it’s the race against and along with the society. Religiously, I mean, secular vs. sacred; spiritual vs. worldly. And as a Christian, it’s a choice of which ‘mask’ or ‘skin’ to disguise myself with everyday. However, is that necessary? No. Nevertheless, it happens because I am human. However, I do have what Alice has, the will power to stand up for what I believe in and be “self-sufficient”.

The end

A major theme of this book centers around the idea that with grief comes loss of identity, but with grappling, hope and transformation may arise from the individual. As Ondaatje creates characters that are unique in their own ways, almost all the characters probably have their own ‘tragic flaw’. For Patrick, his great weakness and tragic flaw was that loss of identity. Hence, he searches for this identity through the people he meets and the tragedies that happen along the way. Not to mention, he searches for ‘light’. On page 157 it reads, “And all of his life Patrick had been oblivious to it, a searcher gazing into the darkness of his own country, a blind man dressing the heroine.” Overall, all of this is revealed in the way he engages with the people who revolve around him, which in turn, creates a more meaningful life. Moreover, this part of the story shows Patrick and his way of processing his life, building a ‘temporary’ identity as he yearns to put the puzzle pieces together, if there were any. In the end, the identity that Patrick was making for himself revolved around the people around him. It was as if those people made his identity and without them he’d be lost forever into ‘darkness’. Hence, the fact that Patrick searches for identity and light is supported with the fact that without the people around him, he’d be nothing. This clearly relates with Patrick’s downfall where there were multiple scenes when the people he’d been so tied closely to had been ‘dissolved’ from him. For this reason, with the absence of the ones who make up his identity, he would obviously be prone to disaster and downfall. In his case, this was when Clara had left him. Clearly, his obsessive cleaning of his room was due to her leaving him and he just couldn’t take it. From pages 82-83, words like, “tirades, broken, befall and doomed” all describe the situation in which Patrick was left to deal with his identity, alone.