Small and Grandiose Gestures: Reading Care in Anil’s Ghost

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which “care” features in narratives embedded in times of conflict. It argues that attitudes and gestures of care are present in Ondaatje’s novel, Anil’s Ghost where the ethics of care (or care ethics) “gives voice to the natural caring inclinations of human beings […] which exist within the psychological, biological, and practical world of human affairs”, as Daniel Engster has explained. Care is never far from the practical dimensions of life, it cannot be provided or understood as away from materiality. The article posits that in this novel a texture of care is superimposed onto one of destruction and horror, and explores the different forms of care deployed by the main characters, to conclude that the scholarly task of discerning caring moments in such frequently extremely painful narratives, enables a form of transitory redemption from the brutalities which, unfortunately, humans repeatedly show themselves to be capable of.