Surfacing Analysis

The opening lines to the novel put the setting front and center, ensuring that the readers are prepared for the remoteness and wildness of the place we'll be spending over the next 27 chapters: "I...

The unnamed protagonist is the central narrator of the novel, so everything gets filtered through her perspective and memories. That deep embedded-ness in her mind ends up being a bit problematic i...

Surfacing is kind of hard to pinpoint genre-wise. It starts out with some elements of detective fiction—since the search for the narrator's missing father initially drives the action—but then i...

We get the narrative through the "lens" of the narrator's own thoughts and memories. She's a fairly passive and unflappable, even in the face of things that you would expect to upset her a lot. For...

Don't try this at home, kids. If you used comma splices as frequently and liberally as this narrator, you'd have some serious trouble in English class. But don't think Atwood doesn't know her mecha...

As we already discussed in "Symbols," the title has a lot to do with the heavy use of water imagery and symbolism in chronicling the narrator's journey toward self-discovery, which involves allowin...

If you were hoping for lots of answers and resolution, this ending might be a wee bit disappointing for you. When the end arrives, we're still reeling from the narrator's attempts to somehow connec...

It's easy enough to figure out what's going on for most of the novel, but the waters get progressively murkier as we get further in. For example, partway through the book, we learn that a great dea...

Water, Water Everywhere When the story begins, an unnamed narrator is bringing her boyfriend and another couple to the region of Quebec where she grew up. The purpose of the trip is to try to find...

The narrator is returning to the area of Northern Quebec where she grew up. It's not exactly a warm and fuzzy homecoming, as she's coming back (after a long absence, apparently) because her father...

The narrator and her friends arrive in the area of Northern Quebec where the narrator grew up. They are on the hunt for the narrator's father, who has apparently disappeared. Holed up in the remote...

Margaret Atwood is an avid conservationist, kind of like the narrator. (Source.) Atwood is so committed to conservation that she threatened to cut the University of Toronto out of her will for usin...

There are some, ahem, "sexual situations," lots of sexual harassment, and quite a few dirty words. Also, there's lots of frank talk about topics such as abortion and birth control. In short, this n...

Boswell, James, Life (4.35)Burns, Robert (4.35)Cowper, William (4.35)Goldsmith, Oliver (4.35)Johnson, Samuel (4.35)Stephens, Peter John (12.63)Thomson, James, Seasons (4.35)Canadian Nationalist Mov...