The English Patient

Content Warning: This section of the guide references scenes containing war violence, drug use, fire injury, abortion, and pedophilia.

Hana, a young woman, is working in a garden. Sensing a change in the weather, she walks into the house, through the kitchen, and into a room whose walls and ceiling are painted with trees and other plants (3). A badly burned man, who will later be revealed as the eponymous “English Patient,” lies in the room. Hana washes his body every four days, thinking of him as saint-like. One day, she skins a plum with her teeth and feeds him small pieces. He tells her stories throughout the next few months, which will be the last of his life.

He remembers happier times, picnics and romantic moments with an unnamed woman. He says he spent weeks in the desert without looking at the moon. Hana asks how he was burned, and he says he “fell burning into the desert” (5). He was rescued by the Bedouins, a nomadic desert tribe, who saw him stand up from the flames. He says the Bedouins had been familiar with crashing planes since 1939 and even made many of their tools from objects recovered from wreckage.