Reading selected texts by Michael Ondaatje, including the novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient and the poem "Birch Bark," Annick Hillger demonstrates how his writing both answers and challenges attempts to delineate the idea of a Canadian national self. She sets Ondaatje's work within the context of theoretical and philosophical ideas, developing the notion of a "literature of silence" concerned with finding a ground for self beyond the realm of language. Not Needing all the Words looks at Ondaatje's work in relation to the post-Cartesian idea of the modern subject as split and alienated. Highlighting the distinction between aesthesis and logic, Hillger traces the ways in which Ondaatje responds to the continuing process of silencing art in the modern age of reason.