Broken Worlds, Broken Forms: Societal Disruption and Narrative Rupture in The English Patient and Green Grass, Running Water

Abstract

This essay argues that Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water treat historical violence not as a mere theme but as a structuring force, showing how each author's departure from linear chronology reflects the cultural position from which they write. Ondaatje, writing as a Sri Lankan immigrant, renders the devastation of total war through a narrative oscillating between past and present, mirroring the fractured relationship to time and identity that displacement produces. King, by contrast, structures his novel through recursion, interruption, and circular return, drawing on Indigenous conceptions of temporality in which past, present, and future coexist rather than proceed sequentially, resisting the colonial logic of linear progress. Reading these formal strategies together, the essay contends that narrative disruption in both novels functions as historiographic critique: structure itself enacts how historical violence reorganizes a people's experience of time, revealing that each novel's formal innovation is inseparable from its author's cultural and historical position.