49 pages • 1 hour read
Michael OndaatjeAnil's Ghost
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “A Brother”
Part 3, Pages 117-37 Summary
Gamini reminisces about working at military base hospitals at the beginning of the conflict. Starting in the mid-1980s, the doctors read popular paperbacks between treating victims of “‘intentional violence.” Overwhelmed by the brutality of the war, Gamini appreciates the ordered regimen of the hospital. Work keeps his emotions at bay. He remembers the story of another doctor, Linus Corea, who stayed in private practice even during the worst of the war. He treated both government officials and high-ranking insurgents, so he thought himself safe from the conflict. However, rebels kidnapped him on a golf course and took him to their camp, where they forced him to treat wounded soldiers. After a time, he stopped thinking about his family and former life in Colombo. When the insurgents bring his family to him, he lacks interest. His life is now his work as a doctor at the rebel camp. Gamini considers how public bombings traumatize not only the people within range of the bomb but also everyone in the city. He now works in the big hospital in Colombo rather than base camp hospitals. Here, insurgents occasionally shoot doctors while looking for specific patients to execute. Gamini rarely sleeps. He takes pills to keep him awake.
Sarath tells Anil that they are taking Gunesena to Gamini, Sarath’s brother. The two are not close. Gamini, who puts more blame for the war on the insurgents, thinks that Sarath’s quest to implicate the government in Sailor’s death is dangerous and ill-conceived. Anil remembers when she first learned of the amygdala, the place in the brain that regulates emotion, including fear. She remembers her own stubbornness in choosing the name Anil, forgoing the final “e” that would have feminized it. She believes that women handle tragedy in the workplace better than men.
Part 3, Pages 138-57 Summary
Anil and Sarath discuss superstitions. Women born under certain celestial patterns, for example, are seen as “‘malefic”—bad luck—especially for men (138). They both deny that they share any of these old-fashioned beliefs. This leads Anil to reflect on her early marriage which, ended badly and quickly. She met her husband, who was also from Sri Lanka, while studying in England. She realizes that she married him out of a feeling of disconnectedness. Once they were married, he tried to impose traditional gender roles on her, and once they divorced, she refuses to utter his name. Anil treats the incident as a shameful moment of weakness in her past. She travels through the United States for her studies and forgoes her first language for English.
Waiting for Sarath at the Archeological Offices in Colombo, Anil remembers working with other young pathologists in Oklahoma, drinking and bowling and listening to loud music. She remembers meeting Cullis there. When Sarath joins her, he tells the story of a man from his village who was taken away on a bicycle, blindfolded and trying to maintain his balance. He reflects that the point was to impress the image on everyone else. Anil asks what the other villagers did. Sarath says, bluntly, “Nothing.” They discuss what he discovered about Sailor: the skeleton was, indeed, buried in one place, likely a swampy area, before its move to the historical burial site in what appears to be a cover up. They will find the artist Palipana recommended and otherwise keep their discoveries to themselves. Sarath worries that Anil’s desire to uncover the truth will lead to more violence.
Part 3 Analysis
In a time of war, with its devastating brutality and disruption, many conflicting emotions and ideas emerge, along with a fixation on the past. Gamini expresses two opposing sentiments in reaction to his experience of the war. On the one hand, nostalgia and excitement surround the theater of war. Gamini has fond memories of the paperbacks that doctors read on break and watching a newborn baby under warming lights amid tragic and unnecessary death—“Anything to direct your thoughts away from a war” (117). On the other hand, Gamini loses faith in humanity amid the war: “he stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war” (119). This echoes Anil’s memories of her days in the States, studying forensic pathology, when the students would bowl and drink and sing after hours: “They snuffed out death with music and craziness” (147). With these passages, Ondaatje suggests that the presence of death heightens the experience of life.
The conflict’s moral chaos, wherein government forces are just as culpable as insurgent groups and separatist rebels, further reinforces The Perversion of Politics. Sarath’s story about the man taken from the village on a bicycle suggests that war is both ridiculous and cruel, rendering unwilling participants, such as the villagers, impotent. Sarath later thinks that Anil’s quest for the truth is just as futile, not to mention hazardous, and his expertise in the inner workings of Sri Lanka give his opinion more weight. Sarath knows well the “dangers in handing truth to an unsafe city” (157). Though his work as an archeologist is to uncover the truth, in this scenario, Sarath finds it pointless: “[H]e would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use” (157). This suggests that truth itself dies alongside the innocent victims of an unjust war. Another casualty of war is effective communication. Gamini’s recollection of Linus Corea includes several references the doctor’s inability to communicate with the insurgents: “They spoke calmly to him in a made-up language” (121). Whether or not the language is code, the implications are clear: Without transparency and understanding, miscommunication and problems occur. Neither side fully comprehends the other side’s intentions or plans. The “invented language” keeps the enemy in the dark and maintains the illusion that the outsider is the enemy.
Anil and Gamini both highlight the theme of Rootlessness and Return. Both feel untethered to their homes, and the pull of work anchors them, both holding them in place and weighing them down. Just as Anil repeatedly asserts that she loves the quiet and focus of the laboratory, Gamini expresses his love for “the order of these closed wards” (119). Anil’s desire for solitude and Gamini’s appreciation of order are both in direct contrast to the chaos of conflict. As Gamini acknowledges, “Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb” (126), dislodging them from the sense of safety that makes a place a home.
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By Michael Ondaatje
