The story is told out of sequence, moving back and forth between the severely burned "English" patient's memories from before his accident and current events at the bomb-damaged Villa San Girolamo (in Fiesole), an Italian monastery, where he is being cared for by Hana, a troubled young Canadian Army nurse.

A few chapters are also devoted to Kip, an Indian Sikh, during his time in England training and working as a sapper on unexploded ordnance.

The English patient's only possession is a well-worn and heavily annotated copy of Herodotus's The Histories that has survived the fiery parachute drop.

[5] Hearing the book constantly being read aloud to him brings about detailed recollections of his desert explorations, yet he is unable to recall his own name.

The patient is in fact László de Almásy, a Hungarian Count and desert explorer, one of many members of a British cartography group.

Caravaggio, an Italian-Canadian in the British foreign intelligence service since the late 1930s, is a friend of Hana and Patrick, her mother's lover.

Kip and the English patient become friends due to the latter's extensive knowledge on both Allied and enemy weaponry and a detailed topography of Tuscany.

The English patient, sedated by morphine, begins to reveal everything: he fell in love with the Englishwoman Katharine Clifton who, with her husband Geoffrey, accompanied Almásy's desert exploration team.

He retrieves her body from the Cave and, while flying back, the decrepit plane leaks oil onto him and both of them catch fire.

Towards the end of the novel, Kip learns through his headset that the US has bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a situation develops where he nearly shoots the English patient.

Count Ladislaus de Almásy is the titular character who comes under Hana's care in Italy after being burned unrecognisably in Africa.

The character is loosely based on László Almásy, a well-known desert explorer in 1930s Egypt, who helped the German side in the Second World War.

As she almost sees no reason in returning home and her excuse to stay in the now abandoned hospital is to take proper care of the English patient, due to Almasy not being able to move because of how severe his burns are externally and internally as well.

On top of this Hana fails to reply or write back her step-mother, whom she loves and is the only living family she has left.

Hana seems to be putting off her life as a young adult and at times shows her immaturity throughout the novel in ignoring Caravaggio's advice or suggestions or simply not facing the reality that awaits her back home.

Hana escapes reality simply by stalling in taking care of the patient, rearranging her set up inside the deteriorating villa, listening to what Almásy has to say or the stories he tells, and by reading books to him over and over again.

Hana claims to have changed and grown up mentally throughout being a nurse during the war, as one would expect, but her "growing up" seems to be much more of building up a wall and being stuck in this continuous process of trying to heal an already dead body.

[10][11] Kirpal (Kip) Singh is an Indian Sikh who has volunteered with the British military for sapper bomb disposal training under Lord Suffolk.

This act of patriotism is not shared by his Indian nationalist brother; the scepticism of his unit's white peers discourages a sense of community for Kip.

Lord Suffolk, an eccentric English nobleman, has developed techniques to dismantle complicated, unexploded bombs in what is a very dangerous occupation.

[12] Kip goes back to India and never returns, he marries and has two children though he never stops recalling the effect of Hana in his life.

David Caravaggio is a Canadian thief whose profession is legitimised by the war, as the Allies needed crafty people to steal Axis documents.

Katharine is the childhood friend and newly-wed wife of Geoffrey Clifton, whom she marries after their days at Oxford University.

Geoffrey is Katharine's husband, on a secret mission for the British government to make detailed aerial maps of North Africa; his joining the Almásy expedition is only a ruse.

The plane he claims to be his own was appropriated by the Crown, and he leaves his wife with the other expedition members while on his mission, leading to her infidelity.

[citation needed] A psychoanalytic analysis of "The English Patient" helps us to understand the meaning of Michael Ondaatje's emphasis on his characters' differences and appearances.

Hana was young, healthy, and capable of caring for more than one person at a time, but she mainly attended to the English patient.

The moral of this is that Hana, the English patient, Kip and Caravaggio had fewer physical resemblances to each other than they had had of humanistic desires.

[23][24] The emotional heart of this novel is found at the core of the character's want and need to survive, which in turn is the eternal damnation they find by everything seeming so bleak.

[29] The novel was adapted into the 1996 film with the same title by Anthony Minghella, starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe, Colin Firth, Naveen Andrews and Juliette Binoche.