ENG353Y1 Lecture Notes - Michael Ondaatje, Ambrose Small, Canadian Identity
Document Summary
To be sane, you need to feel a sense of unity according to lang. Schizophrenia means a division in body and mind for the character in surfacing. Lang derives the definition as a kind of split between body and mind through an etymological interpretation: It can be seen as a woman degenerating into madness and schizophrenia. 181 she starts to give up language. One of her guardians is devoid of nouns. She"s getting rid of things provided by civilization. There are no people, places, things because they"ve been ruined for her. Nouns are responsible for reason, stuff, our ideas but ideas and things that conform to social expectations. Split from the modern world and a movement back to a world outside of it. The break in syntax mirrors a break in the narrator"s mind. We see the break in the language show"s break in the mind.
