Margaret Atwood - Surfacing

Solitude and quest for self-knowledge in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.

Margaret Atwood is one of the most famous female writers in Canada. She is a novelist, poetess but also a book reviewer. Atwood started to write when she was sixteen years old and she has never stopped since. One of her first work that has been published is Surfacing, in 1972. This novel is clearly inspired by her childhood. Indeed, she was born in Ottawa, Ontario and owing to the fact that her father was a zoologist; she spent her whole childhood between the forests of North Canada and Toronto. This paper aims to show to what extent the journey of the narrator to find again her father is in fact, a real quest for self-knowledge oscillating between madness, souvenirs and reality and how solitude and isolation help her to surface.

First of all, as it has been said before, the novel is inspired by Margaret Atwood’s childhood. Indeed, Surfacing is one of the most personal works of the novelist. The plot of the novel takes place in Canada in the middle of nowhere, on an island. The narrator is looking for her father, living on this island and it clearly appears that her souvenirs inspire descriptions of Canadian landscapes being so realistic, as the text reads,

Further in the trees they didn‘t cut before, the flood are marooned, broken and gray white tipped on their sides, their giant contorted roots bleached and skinless; on the sodden trunks are colonies of plants, feeding on disintegration; laurel, sundew the insect eater, its toe nail- sized leaves sticky with red hairs. Out of the leaf nests the flowers rise, pure white, flesh of gnats and midges petals now, metamorphosis. (165)

Moreover, the narrator is a woman who is not named in the novel. Admittedly the reader cannot merge the narrator with the writer but in her first poems collection, The Circle Game, she wrote a poem titled “This is a photograph of me”, of which an extract will now be given,

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center

of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or small I am :

the effect of water

on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually

you will be able to see me.)

Thus, the novel recalls the quest of self-knowledge by the narrator who could possibly be the writer, Margaret Atwood. As it had been said before, this quest goes through souvenirs but also through the narrator’s state of madness, as it is written in the text “Madness is only an amplification of what you already are”. (Tandon and Chandra 56)

Furthermore, the narrator needs to feel alone in the nature to complete successfully this quest in order to know who she really is. Indeed, through the whole plot, the narrator seems to draw away from the peoples surrounding her, Joe her partner and David and Anna a couple of friends. Several times in the novel,

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