Surfacing Themes

The premise of Surfacing is that the narrator and her friends are returning to the narrator's childhood home to search for her missing father. Given that mission—and the fact that no one really s...

Try as she might, the narrator cannot keep her memories at bay; being at home seems to make those pesky thoughts of the old days even more persistent and intrusive. However, don't be too eager to b...

Even though the narrator of Surfacing grew up in the region where she's searching for her father, she feels like a foreigner there (particularly after all the time that's passed). Even apart from t...

Surfacing seems pretty preoccupied with religious figures, particularly Catholic ones, but it's not exactly the most reverent take on Christianity. Rather than subscribing fully to the Catholicism,...

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,...

In Surfacing, the narrator's home region has a very kind of retro or "frozen in time" feel—after all, the local men still sport Elvis Presley haircuts, even though that was more of a 1950s thing....

Even though Surfacing is not set in wartime, references to World War II (and war in general) pop up pretty frequently. In part, these references stem from the fact that the narrator and her brother...

Love is definitely a four-letter word to the narrator of Surfacing (well, it's a four-letter word anyway, literally speaking, but you get the point). She spends the early part of the novel musing a...