Water

Given its title and the fact that the novel is set largely on, near, and in a lake, we were expecting some pretty good water imagery and symbolism—and we were not disappointed. This notion of "surfacing," which clearly references water, is absolutely central to the novel.

When we first crack the book, for example, we are led to believe that the story is going to be about bringing the truth of what happened to the narrator's dad to the "surface"—and that metaphor gets a literal counterpoint when a fisherman accidentally discovers and drags his body out of the lake.

However, the novel ends up being a lot more focused on the narrator's own journey of self-discovery, which involves getting to a place (mentally, that is) where the truth of her past bubbles up to the (yes, you guessed it) surface.

Just to make sure the metaphor of "surfacing" isn't lost on you, the pivotal moment in that journey occurs when she's swimming around in the lake. After apparently seeing a vision in the water below, she realizes that some of the memories she's been indulging in and sharing with readers have been fictions her mind built up to protect her from some of the harsher truths in her past.

Water's powers of reflection also have some symbolic heft in the novel. The narrator seems to be fascinated by dualities, and she suggests that she herself is split (or doubled?) into two separate beings. For example, when things get a little surreal late in the novel, she reports finding two sets of her own footprints side-by-side. It could just be two sets of her footprints from different points in time, but she also seems to suggest that there simply could be two of her walking around.

We're not sure just how that's possible, but the notion that there are somehow two versions of the narrator comes up more than once. When she's out on the water just before her big epiphany, for example, she refers to having an "other shape" that's more a separate being than a mere copy of herself: "I bent my knees and straightened, the canoe teetered like a springboard. My other shape was in the water, not my reflection but my shadow, foreshortened, outline blurred, rays streaming out from around the head" (17.3). What she means by this "other shape" is up for interpretation, of course, but perhaps it's significant that she comes to recognize this separate (spiritual?) form of her self around the time of her pivotal realizations about her past, when she's forced to come to terms with certain unpleasant memories and evaluate her current emotional state and relationships to other people.

All in all, water metaphors do some heavy lifting in Surfacing, bringing attention to the rhythms and movements that the narrative uses to "flow" toward big moments and discoveries.