Reading selected texts by Michael Ondaatje, including the novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient and the poem "Birch Bark," Annick Hillger demonstrates how his writing both answers and challenges attempts to delineate the idea of a Canadian national self. She sets Ondaatje's work within the context of theoretical and philosophical ideas, developing the notion of a "literature of silence" concerned with finding a ground for self beyond the realm of language. Not Needing all the Words looks at Ondaatje's work in relation to the post-Cartesian idea of the modern subject as split...