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What does it matter who speaks?" asks Samuel Beckett via Michel Foucault's essay. "What is an Author?" ". . . Am I just a book?" asks the burned Englishman in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, in response to Caravaggio's attempts to reveal his past as the cartographer/spy Alma sy. Both questions are germane to a central tension in the novel: What are the implications (for texts) of an absent/anonymous narrative creator? In this novel, the issue of "who speaks" is not an innocent one. The English patient would like, for various reasons, to absolve himself of authorial responsibility for his narrative. The most apparent of these reasons is certainly to avoid the repercussions of his being identified as Alma sy. Yet the "black body" of this "despairing saint" gives no clue to his identity, and therefore to the "origin" of the discourse of which he is the source. He is an unreadable enigma, with "all identification consumed in a fire" (3), whom the inhabitants of the villa must nonetheless translate into their own narratives. This absence of locating identification poses a problem for anyone who seeks to "read" the English patient in the terms of what Foucault names in his essay the "Author Function,"