WAYS OF REPRESENTING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE WORLD AND MAN IN THE NOVEL «THE ENGLISH PATIENT» BY M. ONDAATJE

The relevance of the appeal to the novel «The English Patient» by the multicultural writer M. Ondaatje is explained by its semantic layering and ideological pluralism. The purpose of the article is to explore the problem of national and individual identification in Ondaatje’s work and to establish its relationship with the search for true knowledge and the possibilities of its verbal representation. The reconstruction of the novel concept is carried out with the involvement of the main achievements of postmodern philosophical thought (theories of deconstruction, intertextuality, metanarratives, etc.), as well as postcolonial criticism. The focus of special attention is the implementation of binary oppositions of ours – others, national – universal, reality – fiction, theoretical knowledge – practical activity, truth – lie, feeling – rationality, culture – barbarism. The key idea of pantextualism in «The English Patient» is embodied in images and motifs related to literature and reading, which are interpreted mainly as attributes and phenomena of Western culture, plunged after the Second World War into a state of epistemological and ontological crisis. Criticism of the rationalistic European civilization in the person of a cosmopolitan intellectual — the English patient — is carried out from the standpoint of an existential Other — a representative of an alternative model of being, an Indian Kirpal Singh, who, however, does not completely refuse the fruits of another culture, but absorbs them, expanding the horizons of his spiritual existence and finding his own place in his native national culture. In the end, a conclusion is drawn about the conceptually significant character of the biblical text, which opens up a mythopoetic dimension in the history of characters in «The English patient», reconciles antagonistic entities and introduces a humanistic-harmonizing stream into the novel narrative.