Character Analysis
He Who Shall Not Be Named
Our title character is a crispy critter with an unknown background. He is played by Ralph Fiennes (which is pronounced Rafe, just so you know) here practicing for his role as Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise. At least the plane crash that burned 99.9% of his body let him keep his nose.
Not until the death of Randy "Macho Man" Savage had so many people bonded over a piece of beef jerky. The "English" patient—we'll explain the sarcastic quotes later—brings together three people who would normally never meet, puts them together in a house, and watches as things get real.
Hana, the Canadian nurse, takes care of him. Caravaggio, the thief and spy, wants to interrogate him. And Kip, the Sikh minesweeper, is indifferent, although he isn't too happy about England always wanting to tell India what to do.
He is a man waiting to die, but the three younger people in the house help him to love one last time. "I'm dying for rain," he says. "I'm dying anyway, but I… I long for the rain on my face." In one touching scene, the unlikely threesome carries the patient into the rain, granting him his wish. It is a moment when the three younger people are mourning the death of a friend, but the patient reminds them that they can still do something that makes them feel alive.
He may be waiting to die, but as he tells Caravaggio,
"You can't kill me. I died years ago."
His story doesn't actually matter to the people still alive in the house. They would be together with him even if he were a mute. But before he has Hana end his life by giving him a quadruple dose of morphine, he tells everyone his story anyway.
A Man Without a Country… Or a Face
Before he was burned, the patient was Count Laslzo de Almásy, a mapmaker in Egypt, who was having an illicit affair with a woman named Katharine Clifton. Katharine and Almásy are like Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights… or any other pair of beauty-and-the-grouch couples. Elizabeth and Darcy. Bella and Edward. Sam and Frodo.
Almásy wouldn't describe himself as an off-putting grump, though. He would say he's "rusty at social graces." Well, that's a very eloquent way of being… an off-putting grump.
Being alone in the desert must make a man quiet. Almásy dislikes adjectives, saying,
"A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it. Big car. Slow car. Chauffer-driven car."
But when Katharine Clifton comes along, she teaches him the many adjectives of love—passionate love, lustful love, fatal love.
Almásy's hatred for adjectives gets him into trouble. He is a man who, like the wind, doesn't want to belong to any one country. He doesn't have any papers signifying who he is. When Katharine is injured in the desert, Almásy's lack of allegiance to any one nation causes English soldiers to arrest him. Because of his name, they fear he may be German.
Because of this, he has no qualms about betraying the Allies and selling information to the Germans, just to get use of a plane and take Katharine's body from the desert. And, when what remains of his identity is stripped away in a fiery crash, he's left with a new false, adjective—the English patient. "Isn't that funny?" he says. "After all that, I became English." Just like Gwyneth or Madonna.
We would assign one more adjective to him: guilty. As he dies, he feels guilty for everything he's done, mostly for Katharine dying in the desert.
"She died because of me. Because I loved her. Because I… Because I had the wrong name."
Yup. This guy is a tortured hero's tortured hero… tormented until the last.
Count Laszlo de Almásy's Timeline