Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps leave room for identity to be found through the body and environment in Michael's The English Patient Ondaatje and Jazz by Toni Morrison. Ondaatje's characters recover their absent personas by colonizing each other's lovers' bodies, thus developing a metaphor of the body as topography. Morrison turns this in reverse, personifying and fusing the City's infrastructure with human structure as the characters carve synergistically across the City's spaces. Although geographic boundaries impede the characters' ability to connect, both novelists optimistically argue that the bonds of human affection can extend beyond the physical boundaries of the world, as no gulf exists between them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In The English Patient, the empty spaces are represented by Almasy and other characters' porous memories of history, their bodies, and geography. Ondaatje draws a parallel between human memory and written texts: "Thus books for the Englishman, whether he listened carefully or not, had plot gaps like stretches of road swept away by storms" (7). The use of a geographical similarity also foreshadows the connections between humans and the environment that Ondaatje will explore. Hana's identity is also endangered by her reluctance to acknowledge or celebrate her body: "She had refused to look at herself for more than a year, occasionally only her shadow on the walls... She scanned her gaze , trying to recognize itself" (52). Hana's "shadow" is illustrative of her problem; in her eyes, the sensuality of her body has been squeezed out of a voluptuous three-dimensional form "as maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper" (161). Ondaatje clarifies these associations between individuality and geography by suggesting that the desert is the true home of memories: "When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historical, a little pedantic, that imagines or recalls a meeting in which the other had passed innocently... I have lived for years in the desert and I have learned to believe in these things. It is a place of pockets" (259). Not the text, nor the cartography, but the shaped earth is the signifier of identity for Ondaatje's mutilated and nebulous characters. Earth serves a similar purpose in Jazz. The physical spaces of the City offer space for human connection: "...in the space between two buildings, a girl speaks sincerely to a man in a straw hat. He touches her lip to remove something there...The sun shines creeps into the alley behind them" (8). The City is also a structured grid on which its citizens can lean: "Do what you want in the City, it's there to support you and frame you, whatever you do. And what happens in its back lots and side streets is whatever ." the strong will think and the weak will admire All you have to do is pay attention to the drawing" (8-9). By not paying attention to the drawing, however, and going beyond the boundaries, the characters identify emotionally with the City: "The paths of service, of course, are worn out, and there are paths made slippery by the forays of members of one group into the territory of another where something curious or thrilling is believed to be found, something glittering, creaking, frightening... Where you can find danger or be in danger" (10-11). Paradoxically, it is precisely these borders that create spaces of freedom between two land masses or two people, a paradox which in Jazz highlights the union between body and City. The body plays a equally important roleimportant in its relationship with geography in The English Patient - is an evocation of spatial, and not temporal, memory: "Smell his skin, his familiarity. His own taste and flavor...it felt like a place more than a time" (90). Almasy's burned body also recalls a place, the desert, and the ability of a body to be explored, in this case by a ladybug: "Avoiding the sea of ​​white sheet, he begins to make the long journey towards the distance of the rest of his body, a bright red against what appears to be volcanic flesh" (207). The lovers in the novel approach each other's bodies with the same sense of exploratory wonder as the ladybug. Love drives them to colonize their New Worlds, despite Almasy's claim that he hates "property" most (152). Yet even the bruise with which Katharine leaves him after that remark piques (and increases) his interest in the topography of her face: "He became curious, not so much about the bruise, but about the shape of her face. The long eyebrows he'd never noticed before, the beginnings of gray in his sandy hair. He hadn't looked at himself like that in the mirror in years" (152-3). His looking in the mirror reflects Hana's gesture, and although each character's act of self-perception is a solitary activity, it is an offshoot of an alteration in perception through another character; "this nameless, almost faceless man" who forces Hana to reconsider her own face, and Katharine, who awakens fullness and sensitivity in the man who until then had been faceless to himself. Ownership in The English Patient is permitted as long as each lover possesses the other and willingly gives up his own body: "This is my shoulder, she thinks, not her husband's, this is my shoulder. As lovers they offered parts of the their body to each other, like this, in this room on the outskirts of the river" (156). The juxtaposition between the lover's nest and the river is not accidental; Kip's arm is also "geographed" as a river in his relationship with Hana: "She likes to rest her face against his upper arm, that dark brown river, and wake up submerged in it, against the pulse of a vein invisible in his flesh beside her" (125). Hana's love for Kip, at first glance, seems like a Conradesque exploration of the dark continent: "At night, when she releases his hair, he is once again another constellation, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves of it between them in their embrace and in their shifts of sleep" (218). The "equators" of Kip's hair are a metaphor for Hana's mapping of his body, but their loose, wavy arrangement in a constellation dissolves the rigid boundaries between them. Completing the symbiotic cartography, Kip inspects Hana's body with equal discovery: "As if the organs, the heart, the rows of ribs, can be seen beneath the skin, the saliva on her hand now has a color. He has mapped her sadness more than anyone else." " (270). Their bodies, culture, and geography come together as Kip consoles the grieving Hana: "...as Hana now received this tender art, her nails against the million cells of her skin, in her tent, in the 1945, where their continents met in a hill town" (226). Kip's fingernails and Hana's skin, and the topography of their surroundings, blend and defy their different continental origins. In Jazz, however, l he amalgam of body and geography forms an exoskeleton that distorts identity. The anonymous and androgynous narrator absorbs emotional form from the city's imposing and expansive panorama: "A city like this makes me dream high and makes me feel part of things. .. When I look at the strips of green grass that line the river, the steeples of the churches and in the cream and copper corridors of thecondominiums, I am strong, alone, yes, but first-rate and indestructible - like the City in 1926, when all wars are over and there will never be another" (7) . The confident peacetime declaration of the narrator hints at the deceptive qualities of dependence on the City for the corporeal identity that he/she will later repudiate An even more salient look at the conjunction of flesh and concrete emerges in the manifestation of desire in the City: “But if she walks quickly down the street of the big city in heels... the man, reacting to her posture, to the soft skin on the stone, the weight of the building which emphasizes the delicate, dangling shoe, is caught" (34). As the narrator, this is an intentional illusion on the part of the observer: “And he would think that it was the woman he wanted, and not a combination of curved stone and swinging high-heeled shoes. shoe that moves in and out of the sunlight. He would have understood the deception immediately... but it would not have mattered at all because the deception was also part of it" (34). This deception dissolves the exoskeleton that the City had once provided him: "But twenty years later The hair in City had softened [Violet's] arms and loosened the shield that once covered her palms and fingers. As the shoes took away the tough leather that her bare feet had grown, the City took away the strength in her back and arms that she prided herself on" (92). The once borderless City that embodied the limitless dreams of black migrants , which supported a community in which people "enter and exit, enter and exit through the same door" and "put their thighs on a seat where hundreds of people have done so", turns into a rigid and narrow system of streets without the trick of mirrors (117) Describing Joe's new fate, the narrator hints at the power of racism to suppress physical freedom in the City: "Take my word for it, it's track-bound... This is the way the City makes you spin. It makes you do what it wants, go where the marked roads say. All the while leaving you thinking you are free; that you can jump into the bush because you feel like it… You can't go off the path the City offers you" (120). This is a far cry from the narrator's opening remarks about the City's tolerant design: ". ..thoughtful, attentive to where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow" (9). Ondaatje accuses Almasy of similar geographic racism. His membership in the National Geographic Society highlights the dichotomy between open desert and border partitioning in cartography As Almasy argues, "The wilderness could not be claimed or owned: it was a piece of cloth carried by the winds, never held by stones, and given hundreds of changing names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the world. the East... after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to cross the borders, to belong to no one, to no nation" (138-9). The anonymity of the desert, another blow to imprecise textual history of the West, provides the characters with the definitive crevice in which to cram a landfill of identity: "It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of mist just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between earth and paper between distances and legend between nature and narrator... The place where they had chosen to come, to give the best of themselves, to be unaware of their origins" (246). This area without preordained identity is rightly labeled as "area", since its purity lies in the ambiguity of positioning. Almasy's racism, or that of whites in general, has its roots in the arrogant colonization that has corrupted the area: "On the one hand, servants and slaves... On the other the first.