The films Catch-22 （1970） and The English Patient （1996） are based on literary novels, and set in the specific time and place of World War II Italy. Each work uses the topic of the war to raise the issues of ident...The films Catch-22 （1970） and The English Patient （1996） are based on literary novels, and set in the specific time and place of World War II Italy. Each work uses the topic of the war to raise the issues of identity and loyalty that loom large during wartime, when nations place huge demands on their people. Both works explore these issues as relevant to their own time. In the 1960s, Catch-22 elevates loyalty to self as a value and challenges the dehumanizing conformity demanded by the bureaucratic states of the postwar world. Twenty-six years later, The English Patient honors loyalty to people rather than to nations. Both movies end in hope, with Yossarian＇s escape in Catch-22, and the end to the European war in The English Patient. This paper argues that Michael Ondaatje＇s novel, The English Patient, goes beyond the issues of identity and loyalty and the hopeful Hollywood ending as seen in the movies. By giving Kip＇s and Hana＇s points of view, which were not shown in the film--the view of a brown man in a world controlled by whites and of a woman who understands the horrors of the atomic bomb--Ondaatje offers the possibilities of a new sense of identity and loyalty, one more in tune with issues of a post-colonial 21 st century world展开更多
文摘The films Catch-22 （1970） and The English Patient （1996） are based on literary novels, and set in the specific time and place of World War II Italy. Each work uses the topic of the war to raise the issues of identity and loyalty that loom large during wartime, when nations place huge demands on their people. Both works explore these issues as relevant to their own time. In the 1960s, Catch-22 elevates loyalty to self as a value and challenges the dehumanizing conformity demanded by the bureaucratic states of the postwar world. Twenty-six years later, The English Patient honors loyalty to people rather than to nations. Both movies end in hope, with Yossarian＇s escape in Catch-22, and the end to the European war in The English Patient. This paper argues that Michael Ondaatje＇s novel, The English Patient, goes beyond the issues of identity and loyalty and the hopeful Hollywood ending as seen in the movies. By giving Kip＇s and Hana＇s points of view, which were not shown in the film--the view of a brown man in a world controlled by whites and of a woman who understands the horrors of the atomic bomb--Ondaatje offers the possibilities of a new sense of identity and loyalty, one more in tune with issues of a post-colonial 21 st century world
