44 pages • 1 hour read
In the Skin of a Lion
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Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The novel opens with a half-page prologue that contextualizes the narrative that follows. It begins, “This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning” (1). It’s eventually revealed that the man telling this story to the girl is Patrick, the novel’s protagonist, and that the young girl is Hana. They are driving “four hours to Marmora [a mining town in Ontario] under six stars and a moon” (1).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Little Seeds”
The first chapter is a pastiche of memories from Patrick Lewis’s childhood (presumably in the early 1910s) in Bellrock, a rural Ontario town in “a region which did not appear on a map until 1910 […] In the school atlas the place is pale green and nameless” (10-11). Narrating variously in present and past tense, Patrick recalls (in the third person) how he grew up among cattle farmers and observed out-of-town workers seasonally infiltrating Bellrock to work in the burgeoning logging industry. He notes that the workers lack connection to the town and seem foreign and rootless—a first introduction to another important theme in the novel, which is the dichotomy between nativeness and foreignness.
The longest and most dramatic episode in the chapter is Patrick’s recollection of a frigid winter day when he and his father, Hazen Lewis, must rescue a cow that escaped from the herd and fell through the ice over a swimming hole. He describes in striking detail the way he and his father thread a rope around the animal and plunge their arms and upper bodies into the brutally cold water to heave the cow to safety. This harrowing episode reveals how Patrick was conditioned from early childhood to endure extreme physical discomfort in the service of his work. Patrick transcends bodily pain in this way on several occasions later in the novel.
Patrick describes his father as “an abashed man, withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus” (15). Hazen changes careers from cattle farmer to dynamiter, first for the Rathbun Timber Company and later for Richardson Mines. It becomes apparent that Hazen will die in a dynamite accident in a feldspar mine.
The chapter ends with a short vignette of Patrick watching a group of loggers skating on the frozen river, holding torches of flaming cattails. Patrick is struck by their joy and fearlessness.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
The Prologue and Chapter 1, which is comparatively brief, establish the novel’s unconventional narrative style. Because the first chapter is narrated in the third person, it is not immediately clear that Patrick is the “man” in the Prologue telling the girl this story. Furthermore, the present-tense narration throughout the first several pages confuses the reader, who would likely expect past-tense, first-person narration after the Prologue set the scene. The indecisiveness between present and past tense, a distinct feature of the novel’s style, is not yet ostentatious in Chapter 1, which only contains one switch from present to past.
“Little Seeds,” as the chapter title implies, plants the seeds and shows the first shoots of Patrick’s character, as he is the novel’s protagonist and primary viewpoint character. There are only two brief instances of direct narration (quoted speech), terse exchanges between father and son when they are rescuing the cow from the frozen swimming hole. It is emphasized that, beyond these logistical words, “they don’t speak. They must work as quickly as possible” (12). This verbal economy—the emphasis on silence, listening, and observing rather than speaking—explains Patrick’s taciturn nature in the rest of the novel.
The chapter lays groundwork for character and plot development in several other, more obscure ways. The harrowing episode in which Patrick and his father rescue the cow demonstrates dissociation from physical pain (and from the physical body entirely), a theme that pervades the novel, echoed especially in Nicholas’s penchant for dangerous work on the bridge, Patrick’s penchant for dangerous work in the waterworks and tannery, and Patrick’s final crime of breaking into the waterworks. Hazen Lewis’s precarious work as a dynamiter also foreshadows the importance of dynamite and fire in Patrick’s adult life.
Furthermore, Patrick’s childhood interest in learning the names of bugs (first inventing names himself, then discovering the “formal titles” [9]) is an important first appearance of the theme of names, language, and identity. It’s also significant that Patrick is from a practically unknown and nameless area, since identity versus anonymity and names versus namelessness become important themes in the novel and in Patrick’s character development.
Finally, the scene in which Patrick observes the men skating on the frozen river with cattail torches symbolizes his future role as an external observer of communities—communities whose members lack the fear and insecurity that keeps Patrick from participating in their celebrations.
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By Michael Ondaatje
