"In the Skin of a Lion"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Michael Ondaatje "In the Skin of a Lion" reveals another world that co-exists within Toronto's literal history and its current perceived reality as the imaginary community traverse boundaries to another world where a new language exists. The author points out that this book makes use of the metaphor of light moving from darkness into light as the oral history is told and as a linkage between self and the worlds that emerge from the outside of the window. The paper concludes that, although the protagonist Patrick experiences difficulty in the mirror of the immigrant neighbors, he ends up being part of the picture instead of facing it as an individual, demonstrating that the movement between self and other, or old world and new world showing that the boundaries between worlds are liquid-like. Several quotations.

From the Paper:

"The movement from silence into language happens when Patrick starts to understand the foreign language and its world surrounding him; silence represents a world and language represents the other world. Although he is stuck in absence of known words and pictures without explanation in the beginning, after the first "breakthrough" he is able to fathom the foreignness. Patrick's first word is the Macedonian word for iguana. As soon as he learns the word, a group of Macedonians "then circled him trying to desperately to leap over the code of language between them.""

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