Motifs of lightness versus darkness, in physical and emotional as well as metaphorical respects, run throughout Canadian emigre author Michael Ondaatje's post-modernist novel set in Toronto, the 1920's, In the Skin of the Lion (1987). The frequent interplay of the motifs of lightness and darkness is intricately woven throughout the structurally fragmented text. Michael Ondaatje's central character within the story is a 21-year-old new arrival to Toronto from rural Ontario named Patrick Lewis, a young man who feels emotionally hollow and who is in search of himself. Simmons (1998) observes that Patrick describes himself, vis-à-vis other characters in the story, as 'nothing but a prism that refracted [the other characters'] lives' (157). Other descriptive uses of lightness and darkness, as motifs, images, or both, abound within the story as well. Later on, for example, when another key character, Caravaggio, watches a woman named Anne through the window of her boathouse, what he sees is described thus: 'In this light, with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike [sic] on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the center of all the facets' (198). In this essay I will analyze descriptive uses of light and darkness within Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, e.g., in terms of physical light versus physical darkness; emotional light and darkness, and racially-determined "light" and "darkness".

             In the Skin of a Lion is perhaps (arguably) a bildundsroman (a coming-of-age story) about the personal development of Patrick, an "immigrant" of sorts (within his own country) to Toronto. Patrick comes from a very different part of Canada, and after his arrival, embarks on a whole new way of life. As the story opens the starkness of Patrick's childhood and adolescence (often described, in flashback, by using descriptive images of either light or darkness) has left him emotionally bereft, and enveloped, now, in a sort of emotional darkness.