Surfacing Theme of Family/Marriage

Family and marital relationships are at the core of Surfacing. That said, you'd be hard pressed to find one that gives you the warm and fuzzies. The story is littered with failed or ugly marriages, and even the other family relationships (for example, between the narrator and her brother) have a bit of a sinister undertone. The relationships between parents and children don't fare any better, apparently; according to the narrator, it's natural to disown your parents when you reach adulthood, and she claims to have disowned her own child as an infant. (It turns out, however, that she never had the baby she was remembering at all.) All told, people seem pretty isolated in the novel, unable to forge or retain the closest social bonds that exist—that is, the ones that typically occur between family members.

1. Are the related ideas of family and marriage completely rejected in the novel, or is there hope for those institutions and bonds? If so, where?
2. According to the narrator, David and Anna did the supposedly normal thing and "disowned" their parents years ago. What do you think they mean by that? What does "disowning" one's parents mean to them? To the narrator?
3. The narrator goes from talking about the process of childbirth as horrifying and disempowering to viewing it as somehow redemptive (which is why she wants Joe to impregnate her at the end of the novel). What do you think sparks that change?
4. The novel brings up the narrator's brother a ton without letting us meet him—is that important? Why do you think Atwood made that choice? What does it achieve?

At the end of the novel, the narrator seems finally to embrace the family and marriage stuff because she's confronted both her past and herself—that's a key step to connection in Atwood's novel.

The narrator pursues motherhood at the end because she has found a new way to relate to that role. Whereas before she felt totally powerless to control what happened to her body in that arena, at the mercy of birth control pills and the prodding of her partners, now she feels connected to pregnancy and motherhood as a natural and empowering process.