“The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion. They are indeed a ‘blend of several nations’ all coming together to form the amorphous mass that is the working class. The metaphor is made most obvious by the fact that the stage is a ‘strange new country’ through which the puppets must travel, controlled by their dark puppeteers. Puppets as a metaphor for the immigrant class they are the targets of political exploitation, stunned and lost. Illustration of a fable by Aesopus, Fable of the donkey. The novel opens as Patrick is driving with a young girlwhom the reader later discovers is Hana toward Marmora, Ontario, and Patrick recounts his. His owner, however, recognizes him and approaches him with a club. Through fragmented stories and evocative memories, In the Skin of a Lion recounts the story of its protagonist, Patrick Lewis, and his experiences as a member of the Canadian working class. Their costumes were a blend of several nations.” Pg.121 The donkey is dressed in a lion skin, which he has found on the battlefield. It is a time of industrialization and growth for Toronto, a change that could not be accomplished without the labor of immigrants. He does not have a mother as he grows up. All the puppets looked stunned…on this dangerous new country of the stage. In the Skin of a Lion covers the years 1913 1938, and is set in the city of Toronto and surrounding rural areas. In the Skin of a Lion Summary and Analysis of Book One, Chapter 1, 'Little Seeds' Little Seeds This first chapter details the childhood of the protagonist, Patrick Lewis, in the small, rural logging town of Depot Creek, Ontario, Canada with his silent and hard-working father. O Alice’s puppet show = a trope for the plight of the worker/migrant experience The meaning is longer and deeper than a metaphor, more difficult to define due to its overriding nature. In the Skin of a Lion belongs to a Virgilian tra dition of pastoral insofar as pastoral structures and tropes enable and condition the novel's attempt to make sense of history as a mate rial and ideological constraint on human thought and action. A device where meaning is changed, or transferred, from one entity to another. Ondaatje thus adds to the discourse as he challenges and revises the already narrated one to incorporate the other histories.

In the skin of a lion