Exploring Identity in the novels of Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s diasporic background determines his themes of home identity and migration. His texts represent his first home, Sri Lanka and heighten sensitive issues such as the dehumanizing horrors of war. His first novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976) is about the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and covers his last months when he went insane and was committed to an asylum where he died in 1931. Ondaatje’s second novel Running In the Family (1982) is a memoir written about his return to his native Sri Lanka in the 1970s and his attempts to rediscover his roots and his father. In the Skin of a Lion (1987) explores the life of an immigrant neighborhood in Toronto and Southwestern Ontario from 1900 to 1940. His novel The English Patient (1992) which won the Booker Prize explores the effects of World War II on a group of multicultural people. Anil’s Ghost (2000) is Ondaatje’s second literary journey back to Sri Lanka in the middle of the island country’s brutal civil war. Finally, the novel Divisadero tells the tragic tale of a dysfunctional family comprising a single father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, who live on a farm in Northern California.