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. Naturally, the narrator feels pulled into the past visiting a place with so many memories and so much history for her, but she's also conscious of how much has changed—and it's not entirely a pleasant feeling.
The only thing scarier than having to confront the past, to the narrator, is the feeling that time is marching on without your permission—and she definitely butts up against that reality when she realizes she always kind of expected her parents to be around. And they're not. With her mother having passed away from illness some time ago and her father missing, she returns to her hometown to find everything the same… except, you know, for the two people she pictured as never changing, apparently.
Questions About Time
- Why does the narration switch from the present to the past tense from Section 1 to Section 2, and then back again to the present in Section 3? What do these tense acrobatics achieve?
- Looking at the narrator and her journey, would you say that focusing on the past is good or bad? Is that crucial in order to know yourself, or is such awareness stunting?
- Do you think the narrator is ready to move back to the "present tense" at the end of the novel? Why or why not?
- Is time's passage portrayed as threatening or somehow natural? Or both?
Chew on This
The "retro" setting of the novel is a red herring. Atwood soon reveals that, even if one attempts to stay stuck in the past, change is constant and unavoidable. The past is something to be escaped.
The "retro" setting of the novel is used to underscore the narrator's realization that you must maintain an awareness of and honesty regarding your past if you're to move forward.