Historical Obliviousness in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion Graciela Moreira Slepoy, Postgraduate Student, Laval University, Canada This web essay is based upon a paper the author wrote for Professor Neil Bissoondath's "Postcolonial Literature II" [ANG-64699A], Laval University. Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion narrates the forgotten stories of those who contributed to the building of the cityToronto, particularly immigrants and marginal individuals. In the very first page of the novel, Ondaatje stresses the concern withpersonal narratives and the act of storytelling: "This is the story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning[...] She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story..." (4). Similar to Crossing the River,there is a framework story, that of a man telling a story to a girl, that opens and ends the novel and gives coherence to the manypersonal narratives. Patrick has an audience at two narrative levels, namely, Hanna at the textual level and the reader at theextra textual one. The reader is the recipient of the macro story, which is Patrick's act of storytelling, as well as of the microstories contained in it. Like Phillips' novel, Ondaatje's has a circular quality that makes stories transcend time and space; In the Skin of the Lion endswhere it starts. The structure of the novel resembles a Chinese box since a series of interrelated stories form concentric circles,all of which converge in Patrick's act of telling a story to Hanna. He saw himself gazing at so many stories [...] He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves [...] His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw the wondrous night web --all these fragments of a human order... (145) Similar to Caryl Phillips' Crossing ...
