Soon after, David approaches the narrator and tries to seduce her, stating that Anna and Joe are having an affair. The narrator does not give in to his advances. When Anna hears of the narrator’s rejection of David, it causes her to feel guilty and she is cruel to the narrator instead of her husband. The friends’ relationships remain frayed. I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place The others are surprised by the remoteness of this place but it is not weird to the narrator. She looks around for something like a note or a will but there is nothing; it does not seem like a house that has been lived in. She lights a fire and grabs a knife to go to the garden.

The novel, grappling with notions of national and gendered identity, anticipated rising concerns about conservation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. [2] It was adapted into a movie in 1981.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 male characters in "Surfacing" are obnoxiously misogynistic: given that this was written around the same time it is set in, it makes me really angry to think that women were subjected to this sort of talk on a daily basis (from their husbands!) and that this was considered perfectly normal. You begin to sympathize with the main character's revulsion at the idea of marriage if this is what she can be expected to deal with... The novel could be classified as a psychological thriller, and as such it does not appeal to me. It is intended that the reader be confused. Repeatedly pronouns are used in an ambiguous fashion; often whom they refer to is not clear. The reader is to be kept guessing. We are to be tantalized by the mystery. We are meant to be left in the dark but egged on to search for understanding. I prefer writing that is clear. I don’t like guessing games.

Our unnamed female narrator brings her lover and their two (married) friends to her childhood lakeside cabin in the woods for a brief getaway from life and for the two men to capture some footage for the amateur film they are producing. She hides her true intentions of returning to this familiar lake however. She is trying to find her father. Long missing, our narrator does not presume him dead but instead believes that he is still alive and living by the lake. The whole novel is essentially our narrator's internal monologue throughout this strange week by the lake. 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):

Analysis

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Language As Connection to Society

David does not show much respect toward women. He is condescending to both his wife and the narrator and tends to only ever give consideration to his own wants and needs. He has openly been unfaithful to his wife, and continually makes sexual innuendos toward the narrator in front of his wife. He is extremely bullying and controlling toward his wife, often making negative comments about her weight and her intelligence. Although he sees himself as the obvious leader of the group, the narrator does not actually hold him in any high regard—though, ironically, she does see him as the closest in personality to herself. JoeThe couples go fishing and they catch something that I thought was a symbol, but I did not know what it was a symbol of. The central protagonist is a woman in her late twenties. She is unnamed and the narrator of the story. She is searching for her missing father, who had been residing on an island in a lake in northern Quebec. She travels there with a lover and another wed couple. It is on this island that she herself grew up. Returning there, leads her to reexamine her life. The main characters in Surfacing are the unnamed narrator, her boyfriend, Joe, and their friends, David and Anna. The Unnamed Narrator

While searching through her father’s belongings for clues of his whereabouts, the narrator comes across a map with marked locations where her father was planning on carrying out research on Indian wall paintings. The whole group goes on a camping trip to see the paintings, and as they set off, they find a dead heron hanging from a tree; David decides he has to film it because he is making a film called Random Samples. The heron has a haunting effect on the narrator, who cannot stop thinking about it. 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. And, I'm going to be honest here. . . I kind of hate her. Seriously, I don't know if a woman could be less relatable to me. She is wishy-washy, she is totally disconnected and unattached from her self, other people, and certainly as far distant from a spiritual being as a human can possibly be. There's another review to be written about the theme of Canadian national identity that was, in the early 70s, also (re-)surfacing: the Quebec v. rest of Canada theme, which gives the themes of language, of the difficulty communicating, and the idea of separation an entirely new meaning; and Canada v. America, with the idea of cultural appropriation and overtaking violence the undertone. These themes Atwood weaves together with the personal story. And there is, of course, an environmental / conservation theme that is important. So there are these three worlds colliding and transforming--the personal, the political and the natural--providing not just setting and context but illuminating the commentary the novel is making on separation / individuation, self-definition, and identity; creativity and destruction; birth (and rebirth) and death.

Success!

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.