Can In the Skin of a Lion be said to have textual integrity?

Textual integrity is the unity of a text; its coherent use of form and language to
produce an integrated whole in terms of meaning and value; simply put it is the
measurement of how well the text is written and how well it speaks to and is
received by its audience, both during its time and today. The novel In the Skin of a
lion, is a valuable text due to its modernism of its themes and its strong textual
integrity. Composed by Ondaatje, he successfully discovers that our perception of
the world may contain many social makeups that conceal the true convolutedness
of life. This is succeeded through Ondaatjes unorthodox omniscient narration that
emphasizes upon the notion of colonial Canada. Ondaatje relays upon these ideas
through the main elements of the role and power and language, immigrant
experience, and significance of stories.
Language in the novel, In the Skin of a Lion, is a powerful instrument used to
conduct, silence, maintain and even marginalize people. The workers are
disempowered by the imperative that they must communicate through English, a
language they are not conversant in, but if they speak in any language other
than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city, thus, Nicholas realizes, that if
he did not learn the language he would be lost. The workers are given English
names that mock and deny their culture and heritage, Charles Johnson, Nick
Parker, these labels act as a symbol which dehumanize the migrants as the
peculiar names in their native language were remembered like numbers, much like
the numbering in prison. Furthermore, the puppet show at the Waterworks
embodies the frustration of the immigrants inability to be heard. Alices puppet
show illustrates the trope for the plight of the migrants impotent ability to speak
English. Through the central metaphor, they were like targets. All the puppets
looked stunned on this dangerous new country of a stage. Their costumes were a
blend of several nations. Ondaatje depicts the puppets as targets of political
exploitation. The metaphor emphasizes on the fact that the stage is a strange new
country through which puppets must travel and come in unison of a blend of
several nations to form the amorphous mass that is the lower working class.
In the Skin of a Lion is focused on providing the reader the experience of the
disenfranchised immigrants who built Toronto, to give voice to their silent stories.
Their experiences are distinctly expressed through Patricks perspective. History
remembers the construction of the viaduct, however not the men who died
constructing it. Through the metaphor, a man is an extension of a hammer, drill
flame Ondaatje represents the workers as only working parts for the bridge to be
made. The night before the bridge was opened, the immigrants lit their candles for
the bridge dead like a wave of civilization, a net of summer insects over the valley,
the imagery displays how the workers held a silent vigil in respect for those who
passed away constructing the bridge, expressing the their commiseration, not just
for the dead, but the entire marginalized group. As well as being marginalized, the
workers endured extreme working conditions. The immigrants also work on the
Palace of Purification, which they ironically die from tuberculosis, and arthritis
and rheumatism. The use of listing and the repetition of and connectively
emphasis on the extent in which they are suffering. Furthermore, the use of allusion

to animals the brain of the mule, no more and no less knowledgeable than the
body of a man who dug the clay wall in front of him, signifies the insignificant
values of the immigrants additionally connecting that the gruesome treatment of
the immigrants were verisimilitude.
The significance of storytelling can bring about empathy, understand, and convey richness of
cultures and the importance of life. Through the non-linear structure of an omniscient narrator,
Ondaatje uses Patrick as the major storyteller; a watcher who absorbed everything from a
distance where he himself was nothing but a prism that refracted their lives. The metaphor
symbolically conveys how Patrick, without realizing it, brings light to so many different issues
and lives, such as the terrible conditions of the workers and their marginalization, and the need
for all individuals to be heard.
His prism-like qualities allow others to see the importance of stories such as Temelcoff who calls
it Patrick's "gift" and Hanna who will know her mother's story because of Patrick. "Each person
had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility
for the story" (P. 157). The quote taken from theEpic of Gilgamesh: "I will let my hair grow long
for your sake, and I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion" stresses society's
need for a storyteller who has the strength to face hardship and survive to tell the stories that
enrich the lives of others. When Temelcoff is given the power of language he is able to realise
that "he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories." (P. 155)

Meta-fiction
Meta-fiction is when a novel refers to itself as being a constructed
story, an artifice, so that the reader is aware she is reading instead of
being lost in the dream of the story. It intentionally brings the reader
out of the dream of fiction in order to make a point about the art she is
experiencing. Ondaatje emphasizes this theme continually throughout
this novel.
In describing Patrick's love for Alice and their experiences together,
there is this sentence: "He has come across a love story. This is only a
love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me
stay in this field with Alice Gull" This pops us out of the story of
Alice and Patrick to tell us it is a love story. He does not wish for story
but it is still there, in the fact that we are reading it in a novel. Similarly,
when the narrator tells us, "[a]ll his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside
novels and their clear stories" reminds us that Patrick is a character
within a novel. And again: In books he had read, even those
romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that
characters lived only on the page. They altered when the authors eye
was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but
there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character
had his own time zone, his own lamp. . . The irony here is that

Patrick is a character in a novel thinking this about characters in a

novel. The author, Ondaatje, is reminding us that Patrick is a
character, but he is also more than that; he lives off the page too. And
when Patrick is grieving Alice after her death: As if he can be given
that gift, to relive those days when Alice was with him and Hana,
which in literature is the real gift. He turns the page backwards. Once
more there is the image of the struggling and tickling. . . Here, we are
actually reading a piece of literature where we can turn the page
backward and see the image, and then its as if Patrick rises up out of
the page to do the same thing with the reader, causing a meta-fiction.
The moving out and away from the story to observe the story can give
us moments of beauty, which as a poet, Ondaatje is intentionally
creating: "All these fragments of memory ... so we can retreat from the
grand story and stumble accidentally upon a luxury, one of those
underground pools where we can sit still. Those moments, those few
pages in a book we can go back and forth over." This describes the
beauty of finding a passage in a book that you love, and because it is
a book in your hands, you can go back to it, and re-read it and thus
make time stand still. The irony, and the meta-fiction, is that this
happens here at the same time that the novel tells you it is happening.