In the Skin of a Lion Essay -- essays papers

In the Skin of a social 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, bug outicularly immigrants and marginal individuals. In the very first page of the novel, Ondaatje stresses the concern with personal narratives and the act of themetelling This is the story a young girl gathers in a car during the archeozoic hours of the morning ... She listens to the piece as he picks up and brings together heterogeneous 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 more an(prenominal) 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 receiving system of the macro story, which i s Patricks act 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 spot 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 dictum himself gazing at so many stories ... He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves ... His bear feeling was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw the wondrous wickedness web --all these fragments of a humans 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 hold a polyphony of voices even if not all the characters are narrators of their own stories, the reader gets to know their perspectives. He/she has access to the psychic and spiritual vivification of most of them mainly through Patrick Lewes story and through a ternion person narrator. The stories are fragmented and somehow indeterminate. There are many silences and absences that call for an active participation on the part of the reader who tries to stage 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 master narratives and celebrate the openness and heterogeneity of human experience.