"Let me now re-emphasise the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects" How Ondaatje makes use of "loosness" in the novel.
            
            
             In "In The Skin Of A Lion" by Michael Ondaatje, "the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects" is carried into the themes, characters and into the nature of the novel itself. Ondaatje uses a "looseness" in the style of the novel - post modernism, and "looseness of structure" in the way that people are able to stretch and expand their boundaries: transform or mask themselves into someone not typical of their social group.
            
             This novel was written in the late 1980s and is classified as a post-modern work. Essentially, "In The Skin Of A Lion" has many traits of a post-modern novel, it deals with chaos and order, has multi-layered interpretations, provokes an ambiguous and mixed reaction from the reader, and has varied approaches to the conventional storyline; beginning, exposition, and closure. There are liberties taken with the time structure of the narrative.
            
             The story itself is like a "mural, [the] falling together of accomplices." Ondaatje tells of ordinary people who's stories interlock and intersect, with many "fragments of human order". Ondaatje does not tell the stories loosely and scattered with no real purpose in mind, he employs recurring images and motifs, for e.g. moths and insects, feldspar. This is to provide continuity and relevance, and helps him to give a view on the untold history of Toronto. An emphasis is placed on the story that comes from different viewpoints and angles - the "chaos", and then structures it so that its order of history is "very faint, very human" as opposed to official histories.
            
             It takes every single word from the first page to the last, in order to make sense of the meanings, which "travel languorously like messages in a bottle". The novel&...