Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

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Paul’s wooden barometer, which features a wooden man and woman inside, becomes an unfortunately accurate emblem of marriage for the narrator. The narrator’s shifting assessment of the barometer traces her shifting attitudes toward marriage. Initially, the narrator views the barometer couple as representative of a simplistic and even empty marriage, and she compares them to Paul and Madame. She mentions how Paul and Madame even look wooden. The narrator later compares the barometer couple to Anna and David in that the wooden couple, like Anna and David’s happiness, is not real. The narrator also thinks of the barometer in relation to her parents. She compares the image of the barometer with the image of her mother and father sawing a piece of birch. The image of the birch is evocative because the narrator associates birches with unspoiled nature. The implication is that the barometer represents an unattainable, unrealistic version of love, whereas her parents possess true love. The Hanged Heron The main characters in Surfacing are the unnamed narrator, her boyfriend, Joe, and their friends, David and Anna. The Unnamed Narrator The story’s themes encompass not only the psychological consequences of separation but also Canadian nationalism, feminism and environmental concerns. In my view, the additional themes are simply touched upon. They are mere side commentaries to what is supposed to be an exciting mystery. I do not even think the central mystery of the missing father is adequately probed. Joe asks if there is any news of her father and she says no in a calm, level tone. Maybe that is what he likes about her—her cool demeanor. She cannot remember much about their first meeting except it was in a corner store and then they went and had coffee. He told her later he liked how she took off and put on her clothes like she had no emotion, but she secretly thought to herself that she really didn’t have any.

Paul’s wife is referred to as “Madame” in the story. She was somewhat friendly with the narrator’s mother since their husbands were friends. However, since the narrator’s mother was an English speaker and Madame was a French speaker, the language barrier seems to have prevented a close friendship. The Narrator's Father and then (with the always satisfying visceral, gritty Atwood detail; also, read it aloud and hear the SOUND of the words--another element of the poetry): The narrator discovers that the wall paintings are under the lake. David maliciously teases Anna, humiliating her by demanding she take her clothes off for his film project. Anna tells the narrator David is unfaithful to her and she is unhappy. The narrator later asks David why he is horrible to Anna, and he says he does it because she often cheats on him.It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it: I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother's stomach, like a frog in a jar. In both cases, the camera symbolizes how the value of women and nature is commodified by the patriarchy, alienating both from the society in which they exist. The narrator eventually destroys the film as an act of rebellion against the oppression, exploitation, and alienation of women and their identities. Surfacing Themes

The seasoned American guide who takes the narrator, Joe, Anna, and David to and from the narrator’s father’s island. Evans is gruff and minds his own business; he is aware that the narrator’s father has disappeared, but he never asks the narrator about it. Madame In this novel there is more explicit anti-Americanism than in Catseye, and it is of a different kind to that in her later novels which are generally unlove letters to the USA in one way or another. The narrator and protagonist of the novel, her name is never actually revealed. A woman in her 20s-30s, she works as a freelance artist and is illustrating a children’s book during the course of the novel. She is stoic and guarded, not often showing her emotions openly. She grew up on an island in a remote area of Québec with her mother, father, and older brother. As English speakers, they were further separated from the French-speaking townspeople and the family lived an isolated existence. The narrator is extremely damaged from her past which she is not completely honest with herself about. The couple have a marriage that is crumbling. He’s enjoying himself, he thinks this is reality . . . He spent four years in New York and became political, he was studying something; it was during the sixties, I’m not sure when. My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for a year and the others wouldn’t notice.Unnamed Protagonist is a woodsy gal, not necessarily by choice, but by a plan of her father's making. She and her brother were raised by their bizarre parents on a remote island surrounded by a remote village somewhere in a remote and very Catholic corner of Quebec. She says she would like to go down to the lake for a couple days to look around, and her friends agree. David says he wants to catch a fish. If her father is safe, she does not want to see him, as her parents never understood about the divorce or even the marriage, but she did not understand it herself. They also did not understand why she left the child but she could not explain how it was never really hers anyway.

It isn't just individual men that alienate and oppress women like the narrator. It's society itself. In this patriarchal society, exploitation becomes a natural fact of life. Take David's camera: he spends the entire trip capturing film that demeans and objectifies women and Nature alike. He takes videos of a dead heron hanging from a tree and intends to use them to further his own agenda instead of honoring the bird's life. Likewise, he pressures Anna to strip for the sake of the film, verbally abusing her until she does. Anna immediately regrets giving in to her husband's demands, as he plans to objectify and exploit her body in his film. The narrator remains unnamed throughout the novel, emphasizing how she functions as a symbol of the feminine struggle to develop a personal identity within the patriarchy. She spends much of the novel searching for her missing father, oscillating between hope that he is alive, grief that he is dead, and fear that he has gone mad. The narrator also struggles to navigate her unloving relationship with her boyfriend and her fear that she is emotionless. She exemplifies an unreliable narrator, as her understanding of reality constantly twists, transforms, and contradicts itself. At the novel's end, the narrator sinks into madness, throwing off her complicated human identity and embracing that of an animal. Two Canadian campers whom the narrator initially mistakes for American tourists. They are avid fishers, and they befriend David. They are also responsible for killing and hanging a heron, and for their senseless violence the narrator believes them to be Americans. Claude So, if you happen to know the general plot of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, you can understand, with confidence, that I have very little in common with the Unnamed Protagonist. We both might have had unusual parents, but the commonalities stop there. In The Evil Dead these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and they release evil spirits that want to kill them etc. In Cabin Fever these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and catch a flesh eating disease and die and go mad, etc. In The Cabin in the Woods these kids go and stay in a remote cabin way out in the woods where a zombie army tries to kills them etc. Now these are movies but in Surfacing, which is a book, these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods but the big difference is there are no zombies and flesh eating bugs and evil spirits at all all though are they. It is a profound question.

Surfacing - Key takeaways

She thinks of how she had a good childhood and was not aware of what was going on with WWII and the Holocaust (but her brother told her later). Now she walks through the familiar village and waits for nostalgia to hit. There are more boats than cars parked, which means it is a bad season. This is my third Atwood book after The Handmaid's Tale (which I studied in college) and The Blind Assassin (which I read of my own accord at University). Atwood has always interested me as a writer but never particularly enchanted me. Here was the first time I was genuinely stunned by her control of language; the prose in Surfacing is wonderful, a true pleasure to read from start to finish.