Dragana Imbric

Michael Ondaatje's "In the Skin of a Lion" and Multiculturalism: the Rewritten History of an Immigrant Experience Dragana Imbric

In his novel "In the Skin of a Lion", Michael Ondaatje masterly goes back through time and brings back to life again the history of the vibrating and growing city of Toronto, Canada in the 1920s. He feelingy deals with the corners of history often forgotten, rewriting the story anew, giving a voice to the immigrants experience, where Toronto becomes alive again as a stage for continually growing and changing multicultural narratives. In "Michael Ondaatje's 'In the Skin of a Lion' and Multiculturalism", Ondaatjes's authorial tools bringing to life the immigrant narrative are being closely and expresively analysed. Making use of Ondaatje's personal immigrant experience, Imbric deals with the presentation of history also Canada's immigration history, the concept of language and narrative as such, post-colonialism and postmodernism as features used to present the notion of multiculturalism in the novel, offering to the reader new facets of a world believed to be already fully experienced.