Paul’s wife. Madame is a French woman living in the village close to the narrator’s father’s island. Simple and polite, she speaks only French. Because they only speak English, the narrator and the narrator’s mother both experience long, awkward conversations with Madame. The Town Priest They stop at a motel with a bar and the narrator says she is going out on her own. The others are a little relieved, and stay to drink beer. The narrator is glad that they have a car so she could get here, and she likes and trusts them, but she knows they do not understand why she is here. They disowned their parents a long time ago, and they do not get why she is looking for her father.

Throughout Surfacing, the narrator’s feeling of powerlessness is coupled with an inability to use language. When she goes mad, she cannot understand David’s words or speak out against his advances. Similarly, when the search party comes for her, she cannot understand their speech, and her only defense from them is flight. Words betray her, as it is by yelling that the search party discovers her. The narrator maintains the false hope that she can reject human language just as she imagines she can reject human society. She admires how animals know the types of plants without naming them. When she goes mad, she vows not to teach her child language—yet eventually she conquers her alienation by embracing language. The Total Alienation of Women She says she would like to go down to the lake for a couple days to look around, and her friends agree. David says he wants to catch a fish. If her father is safe, she does not want to see him, as her parents never understood about the divorce or even the marriage, but she did not understand it herself. They also did not understand why she left the child but she could not explain how it was never really hers anyway. The prot’s father has disappeared and that is why they go to the remote cabin. They think he had gone feral . The situation could be like Man Thing, which is a manga I have read, but it is not, as the Prot’s father does not became a Man Thing. I was thinking that if the father did become a Man Thing he would be waiting in the woods and catch them and rip them up to make more Man Things, but this does not happen. They stay in her father's very rustic cabin while she searches for him. And tensions mount. There is a constricting malevolence present; there are eyes that seem to be watching, a predatory atmosphere. What should be an idyllic week of camping in the woods, is ... not. Though this book definitely has environmental themes, it isn't described in Wordsworthian swoon-inducing curlicues. In fact, what with the leeches, the rotting bird carcass, the entrails, et al, nature isn't something to mess with.

Paul is an old acquaintance of the family whom the narrator has known all her life. He appears to have been friends with her father and is the one who first noticed he was missing. Although he is a French-Canadian, he speaks English. Like the protagonist's father, Paul represents the simple life and, like her mother, he is closely linked with nature and growing things. Madame As a baby, he once came close to drowning, something that looms large in the protagonist's mind. As an older child, he demonstrated cruelty to animals. We do not know where he is or what he does now, but he has made it a point to be far from the island. Claude Through the protagonist, Atwood examines the destructive nature of human beings, against each other and the other living creatures they have to share spaces with. In such vivid prose she transports the reader to a Canadian lake surrounded by woods. And in case this sounds idyllic to any of you compost-your-own-waste types, it's not. It's agony. As far as this reader can tell, Mom was a distant/aloof type and Dad was occasionally cool but waaay out there in his thinking. Neither parent supported the natural social growth or adolescent curiosity of their offspring, and when the kids went to school in the city during the winters, they suffered as the subjects of a cruel scrutiny and social disdain. In The Evil Dead these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and they release evil spirits that want to kill them etc. In Cabin Fever these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and catch a flesh eating disease and die and go mad, etc. In The Cabin in the Woods these kids go and stay in a remote cabin way out in the woods where a zombie army tries to kills them etc. Now these are movies but in Surfacing, which is a book, these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods but the big difference is there are no zombies and flesh eating bugs and evil spirits at all all though are they. It is a profound question.

The narrator remains unnamed throughout the novel, emphasizing how she functions as a symbol of the feminine struggle to develop a personal identity within the patriarchy. She spends much of the novel searching for her missing father, oscillating between hope that he is alive, grief that he is dead, and fear that he has gone mad. The narrator also struggles to navigate her unloving relationship with her boyfriend and her fear that she is emotionless. She exemplifies an unreliable narrator, as her understanding of reality constantly twists, transforms, and contradicts itself. At the novel's end, the narrator sinks into madness, throwing off her complicated human identity and embracing that of an animal. The narrator discovers that the wall paintings are under the lake. David maliciously teases Anna, humiliating her by demanding she take her clothes off for his film project. Anna tells the narrator David is unfaithful to her and she is unhappy. The narrator later asks David why he is horrible to Anna, and he says he does it because she often cheats on him. But, Surfacing was only her second novel and it's no surprise that she has led a long literary career after such a book as this.

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The garden has been rearranged since she was last there and the crop is paltry. Anna comes out looking for the toilet. She asks if the narrator is okay and she says sure, surprised by the question. Anna says she is sorry they did not find her father, her eyes big as if it is “her grief, her catastrophe” (33). One of Atwood’s earliest and lesser-known novels, Surfacing is a dense, complex, and often uncomfortable look at contemporary (1970s) feminism; the workings of the mind and memory; the relationship between Canada and the U.S.; nature vs. civilization; fairy tale, myth, and the hero(ine)’s journey; and much more. With powerful imagery and often obscure symbolism, the unnamed female narrator takes us into the recesses of her mind, providing us with a narrative we assume to be true and then, later, complicating it and ultimately revealing it to be mostly false. With the news of her father’s death, the narrator and her friends decide to go home. Instead of going with them, the narrator abandons them. She takes David’s film and destroys it and leaves by boat. Now she is alone on the island and she begins to become more unhinged as she destroys her own artwork, the furnishings of the cabin, and envisions her dead parents. She abandons her clothes, begins eating plants, and lives in a burrow.

A remote island in the Canadian wilderness, a missing family member, an abusive marriage, and an unstable narrator— Surfacing (1972) has all the makings of a horror novel, but the intensity of Margaret Atwood's (1939-present) novel is psychological, not physical. Atwood's second novel, Surfacing follows a group of characters who venture into an island near Quebec to find the narrator's missing father. Instead of uncovering the missing man, the narrator uncovers parts of herself that have long since been repressed. Surfacing examines themes such as the domination and alienation of women and the reclamation of identity. Keep reading for a summary, an analysis, and more. Surfacing Summary He is the son of the owner of the village motel and bar. In addition to helping his father run the bar, he works as a fishing guide. Malmstrom This is my third Atwood book after The Handmaid's Tale (which I studied in college) and The Blind Assassin (which I read of my own accord at University). Atwood has always interested me as a writer but never particularly enchanted me. Here was the first time I was genuinely stunned by her control of language; the prose in Surfacing is wonderful, a true pleasure to read from start to finish. Separation is a major theme of Surfacing. This is established in the first chapter, when the narrator is shown to be politically dispossessed as an English-speaker in Quebec, at a time in which Quebec was aspiring to become an independent French-speaking nation. [3] The narrator also feels disconnected from the people around her, equating human interaction with that of animals. For example, while overhearing David and Anna have sex, the narrator thinks "of an animal at the moment the trap closes". [4] It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it: I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother's stomach, like a frog in a jar.It isn't just individual men that alienate and oppress women like the narrator. It's society itself. In this patriarchal society, exploitation becomes a natural fact of life. Take David's camera: he spends the entire trip capturing film that demeans and objectifies women and Nature alike. He takes videos of a dead heron hanging from a tree and intends to use them to further his own agenda instead of honoring the bird's life. Likewise, he pressures Anna to strip for the sake of the film, verbally abusing her until she does. Anna immediately regrets giving in to her husband's demands, as he plans to objectify and exploit her body in his film. The narrator observes David and comments on his past just before taking her friends to the island in Chapter 3. The narrator’s disdain for David’s enjoyment of Greenwich Village reflects her intolerance for tourists who come to Quebec seeking an authentic outdoor experience. David is a city-dweller, and the narrator feels perturbed by his casual enjoyment of the trappings of outdoor life, such as fishing or chopping firewood. She inherits this disdain in part from her father, who used to size up men for their ability to live outdoors on their own. Another part of her resents the American tourists who seek out the wilderness only to spoil it. The narrator believes her parents would not have approved of her life after she left home. Frequently, she recalls scenes from her marriage and divorce, and she slowly begins to admit to herself that much of what she wants to imagine about her recent years is false. There was no wedding; the scene she has in her memory is actually of the time her already married lover sent her to have an abortion. What her current lover, Joe, admires as her calmness she considers her numbness, an inability to feel. Atwood digs deep into the female psyche, as well as the human psyche, probing and poking in all the dark underwater caves that the modern world has separated us from. Her unnamed protagonist is searching for her missing father in a remote area of northeast Canada. She has brought along her current lover and a married couple whom, removed from their city life in Toronto, she is able to see clearly and critically, and bit by bit she comes to measure how far removed she has become from the more conscious life of her childhood. Anna is a friend of the narrator and the only other female in their party. She is married to David and at first appears to have a great marriage. However, as the story progresses, it is revealed that their marriage is far from what the narrator had imagined.