Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing is an intensely symbolic novel about an artist whose weekend trip home to search for her missing father turns into a journey of self-discovery. Atwood avoids naming the narrator of Surfacing in order to emphasise the universality of the narrator’s feeling of alienation from society. As the central character of the novel, the narrator is the one person we know the most about. In Contrast, many of the secondary characters in Surfacing are two-dimensional or flat. Most of what we know of them is limited to how the narrator feels about describing them. The narrator, on the other hand, is provided with a fuller background, which helps to explain certain things in her personality and behaviour. In addition, she is revealed to us both by what she says and by what she doesn’t say.
The character that the narrator’s voice establishes at the beginning of the book seems to be a certain type of contemporary woman- cool, uninvolved and unemotional. We soon learn that this coolness masks a feeling of alienation from others. The narrator is not simply unemotional but is full of repressed emotion and, as a result, full of tension and anxiousness.
As the narrator journeys north to the family cabin where her father has been living, the reader begins to see that she, like her friends. is completely cut off from her past. She stopped visiting her parents several years ago, seeing her mother only briefly before she died and having no contact at all with her father. The fact that the narrator remains nameless also reinforces the idea that she is cut off from her past and her true identity.
Looking at the narratorý background, slowly see some of the reasons for her alienation and her inability to feel. Her relationship with her parents has never been close. Although her father talked with her when she was young, his conversation was usually about concepts of reason and did not draw the two together. Her mother, on the other hand, did not seem to speak much at all. Although the narrator and her brother played together, his attraction to violence began to separate them.
Forced to divide her time between the anonymity of large cities and the isolation of the island, the narrator’s alienation increases as she grows older. She is awkward and shy with other schoolchildren, and they tease and torment her. As she grows older, she begins to imitate the behaviour of others and does not say or do what she really feels. She abandons her dream of becoming an artist, for example, because her teacher tells her there have never been any famous woman artists. As a commercial artist, she draws whatever will please her publisher. In addition, her relationship with Joe reveals that she is not simply aloof but is empty of any emotions. She recalls that he was impressed by her coolness the first time they made love. The narrator, however, did not find her behaviour unusual because she really didn’t feel anything.
When the truth of the narrator’s early love affair and abortion are revealed, the reader suddenly learns a great deal more about her personality. Unable to accept the truth about her past, she began cutting herself off from her feelings because of the pain and guilt she was experiencing. She constructed elaborate, false Stories to lessen her pain. Once she comes face-to-face with the truth, she allows herself to experience that pain and begins to unlock her feelings. By accepting her past the way it really was, she also accepts the guilt and responsibility that goes with it. By the end of the novel, she is a more emotional and less alienated person. She is less suspicious of others and begins to see Joe’s wish to marry her as an expression of love and not as an attempt to overcome and sou, She to see Joe’s wish to that of love and not as an attempt to overcome and conquer her.
Moreover, the causes and effects of the narrator’s psychological transformation remain somewhat mysterious. The narrator feels emotionally numb, isolated by the numerous roles she is supposed to play in her life. Atwood explores a woman’s place in all of its facets: as a human, a wife, a mother and as a religious person and a sexual being. The narrator’s madness seems to arise from her anger at all of the standard roles forced upon women. Her response to this alienation is to become an animal. She sees animals not as beasts without reason but as graceful creatures that are better than humans at peacefully coexisting with Nature. The result of the narrator’s transformation is a greater understanding of her place in society. This understanding comes out of necessity because the narrator realises that complete withdrawal from society will result in her death. However, the narrator also reaches new conclusions about how she will cope with society’s ills. She resolves to rejoin society without succumbing to the pressures that once subdued her.
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