In the Skin of a Lion Question #2

#2)
I identify definitely the most with Patrick Lewis. I feel like I can so understand Patrick and his actions.

Even when Patrick came to Toronto for the first time, I felt like I was in his position. When he felt like it was a new world, I felt like I was looking back at my childhood. His emotions of feeling lost, empty, needing hope and identity was exactly how I felt in Sweden. I was only 7 years old when I first went to Sweden. I knew nothing about this foreign country. No language, no culture, no identity existed inside me. I felt like I wanted everyone to stop talking because I could not understand anything. I was so lost that I wondered as I grew up in Sweden about my identity. The honest expression of how I felt was that I felt like a monkey with black hair, in a zoo. I felt so intimidated by the foreigners and I felt anger and grief at the same time. Just like Patrick had that inner grief that made him lose his identity but also find it, I too showed lots of anger. Even though I did not blow up anything with dynamite, I had the same sort of firing anger resulting from the grief of being so embarrassed and different. In my situation, this difference was between Asians, and Europeans, while for Patrick it was the immigrants (poor) versus the Rich.

I haven’t experienced losses of a “husband,” but I have lost many friendships due to my unstable life. Having moved schools so many times, I always had to make new friends, and become separated from old ones. My grief may not have been as strong as Patrick’s but I feel that it was similar in that both were continuous losses throughout our lives.

I think that pathos definitely is an element of my response to this character. In the novel, the part where Clara leaves Patrick and comes back after Patrick was almost murdered by Ambrose, and when she leaves him again, I felt so much sympathy for Patrick. The fact that he was abandoned twice and Ondaatje’s description of how Patrick was made me feel so bad: “After Clara leaves him, Patrick cleans his room on Queen Street obsessively. Soap crystals fizz in a pail, the mop slices the week’s dust. Then he sits in the only dry corner where he has previously placed cigarettes and smokes the Roxy, dropping ash into the bucket beside him.” This is not the way someone copes with grief. I felt that Patrick was so destroyed due to his grief that there is so much pathos present. Even his violent attempts to blow up the Waterworks to me seemed as a struggle to get rid of his pain and grief. To me even the last scene where he talked on the phone with Clara, I felt the pain, it seemed like her phone call could have caused him to feel grief once more.