In the Skin of a Lion Essay -- essays papers

In the Skin of a lionHistorical Obliviousness in Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of a Lion Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of a Lion narrates the forgotten stories of those who contributed to the building of the city Toronto, particularly immigrants and marginal individuals. In the very first page of the novel, Ondaatje stresses the concern with in-person narratives and the bend of story corpulent This is the story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning ... She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together variant corners of the story... (4). Similar to Crossing the River, there is a framework story, that of a man telling a story to a girl, that opens and ends the novel and gives coherence to the many personal narratives. Patrick has an audience at two narrative levels, namely, Hanna at the textual level and the reader at the extra textual one. The reader is the recipient of the macro story, which is Patricks coiffure of storytelling, as well as of the micro stories contained in it. Like Phillips novel, Ondaatjes has a circular quality that makes stories transcend time and space In the Skin of the Lion ends where it starts. The structure of the novel resembles a Chinese box since a series of interrelated stories form concentric circles, all of which converge in Patricks act of telling a story to Hanna. He saw himself gazing at so many stories ... He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more(prenominal) than themselves ... His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw the terrific night web --all these fragments of a human order... (145) Simil... ...y. In the Skin of a Lion creates an intimate space where the silenced, marginal and ex-centric author and tell their own stories. Ondaatjes characters form a polyphony of voices even if not all the characters are narrators of thei r own stories, the reader gets to know their perspectives. He/she has access to the psychic and spiritual life of most(prenominal) of them mainly through Patrick Lewes story and through a third person narrator. The stories are fragmented and somehow indeterminate. There are many silences and absences that call for an restless participation on the part of the reader who tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together. As in Phillips novel, the privileging of fragmented plural perspectives is an effort to avoid the closure and totalisationthat characterise headwaiter narratives and celebrate the openness and heterogeneity of human experience.