Do you have any suggestions on major themes other than nationality and identity in The English Patient?

The novel offers, in its characters, particularly in the
patient himself, ambiguities: they are in war, full of fire and destruction, yet they
attempt to restore themselves, or others. So the novel and the character of the patient
tell us that we can believe two opposing ideas at the one time: love = hate (patient and
affair), fire = water (Caravaggio falls into a river on
fire).

The characters in that Italian ruin reject the roles
allotted to them by war and war itself represents ambiguity in terms of how we are let
off the biblical hook of God’s edict – thou shalt not
kill.

 In the way Ondaatje tells this story of The English
Patient, not with a definite beginning, middle and end, he offers rejection of the
traditional historical way of telling the story. Through his focus on characters who are
dislocated, Ondaatje has made a kind of patchwork quilt of a story. The pieces, all
differently colored and not at all the same, form a rich narrative of complex human
identity. Ondaatje’s story and his way of telling it are like the patient himself, with
cul de sacs of memory and taking up different points of views on questions, just as the
medieval historians who consulted with the invading allies offered a wrong perspective –
in terms of time frame - on how to take the medieval Italian
towns.

Ondaatje’s themes are like the patient’s story of an
adulterous affair and its tragic outcome, like his wanderings in the unsullied desert
that had nothing much to do with the official history (His – story) of war, like the
sullied saint he is (laden with guilt about that love). So the reader comes away feeling
that if we can forget linear history – the official versions of events with its very
narrow singular view of events - that if in fact we tried to understand the rich mystery
of other selves, then maybe none of those characters would have had to try to restore
themselves in a ruined villa in the Italian countryside.  They would not have to take
themselves out of the current of ‘their’ world history and its inexorable erasing of
human lives. They would not have had to plunge into the pool, the well of the patient’s
Christ-like mystery. In fact, the patient would simply not have existed in that place
and time. Christ is dead – long live humanity.