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. This book is way too I-hate-God and Single-Cell-Organisms-Rule for me. I love Nature, but I can't even begin to tell you how much I DON'T want to return to my primitive state of a pile of mud. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Language As Connection to Society The main themes in Surfacing are identity and otherness and the domination and reclamation of identity. The Alienation and Domination of Women A woman travels in the company of friends to a remote island to find out what happened to her father, who suddenly disappeared without a trace. Underneath the surface, stored memories of things past begin to move - upward, outward - until they burst like bubbles when they are surfacing.

The novel, grappling with notions of national and gendered identity, anticipated rising concerns about conservation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. [2] It was adapted into a movie in 1981. Anna’s makeup, which David demands she wear at all times, represents the large-scale subjugation of women. The narrator compares Anna to a doll when she sees her putting on makeup, because Anna becomes David’s sexual plaything. At the same time, makeup represents female deception. Anna uses makeup as a veneer of beauty, and the behavior is representative of the way she acts virtuous (but sleeps with other men) and happy (but feels miserable). Makeup goes completely against the narrator’s ideal of a natural woman. The narrator calls herself a natural woman directly after her madness, when she looks in a mirror and sees herself naked and completely disheveled. The narrator comments that Anna uses makeup to emulate a corrupt womanly ideal. The Ring Unnamed Protagonist is a woodsy gal, not necessarily by choice, but by a plan of her father's making. She and her brother were raised by their bizarre parents on a remote island surrounded by a remote village somewhere in a remote and very Catholic corner of Quebec. I can see how some people wouldn't like this kind of book: there's not much action, and it is extremely introspective, a hashing out of memories the reader can easily loose their way into. The immersive narrative puts you in the middle of this woman's inner monologue and that can get unnerving, but I enjoyed it. Atwood's prose is evocative enough to make you feel like the story is happening to you and if you don't mind feeling slightly uncomfortable at time, it's a fascinating experience. The second Atwood book I have read, and it was just as absorbing and as striking as the first, The Handmaid's Tale. Having finished The Vegetarian just before I started on this, reading this felt like a companion book to The Vegetarian. Both books have female protagonists that develop an aversion for animal flesh and human beings and later themselves and retreat into themselves but with varying repercussions.When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict. I did that, I fed him unlimited supplies of nothing, he wasn't ready for it, it was too strong for him, he had to fill it up, like people isolated in a blank room who see patterns. Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Barometer The prottergonist does not have a name. This surprises me. It may be no one noticed but you will think that somebody should of read this book before it was printed and pointed this out. So I will have to describe the prottergonist as The Prot as it is easier. 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 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.

I enjoyed and was fascinated by this book, all the way through. I marvelled at the writing. It's poetic, visually evocative, full of mood. But it's complex. It's slippery. I wouldn't say it's an easy or "delightful" read. It's more how I feel about eating a kale salad... I know it's good for me, I know it's important. Margaret Atwood is such a powerhouse, "feminist" does not cover it; she shoots female identity so far out of the box, she isn't contained by language, clothes, or definitions. She struggles with society’s expectations of women and femininity and lives unmarried with her boyfriend Joe. She tells us she abandoned her child with her ex-husband but this is later revealed to be a delusion. The truth is that she had an unwanted abortion after being convinced by her lover, an already married man with a family. Her false memories have been a way for her to cope with the pain in her past. 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.In this novel there is more explicit anti-Americanism than in Catseye, and it is of a different kind to that in her later novels which are generally unlove letters to the USA in one way or another. The central protagonist is a woman in her late twenties. She is unnamed and the narrator of the story. She is searching for her missing father, who had been residing on an island in a lake in northern Quebec. She travels there with a lover and another wed couple. It is on this island that she herself grew up. Returning there, leads her to reexamine her life. The narrator is extremely damaged from her past which she is not completely honest with herself about. The couple have a marriage that is crumbling. I just want to start by saying that I've read some strange books, but this one's definitely up there. There's only one thing I'm sure about, and that's that the writing is gorgeous. This is my first Atwood novel, and I will definitely be reading more. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what happened.

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 That story appealed to me for so many reasons: I was on very familiar territory with her setting and her nameless main character's deep need to escape it. I was amused by the way her city friends find the small, run down village to be cute and authentic when the people living in it would have rather been anywhere than there. But city people and country-side people always treat the other like zoo animals... I underlined many interesting reflections on social awkwardness, and the struggle of the introverts and how little the behavioral expectations of women and children have changed in the last forty years. Ms. Atwood doesn't miss much, does she? 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. 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. A nameless protagonist is in northern Quebec, in a very remote area, in search of her father who has gone missing. She brings with her Joe (her boyfriend) and another couple, Anna and David (who are super effed up, btw). She also brings with her ghosts from her past, things that have haunted her her entire life and have somehow kept her separate from others, even from herself, even from the reader (who cannot hope to relate to her, and doesn't ever even learn her name).He's got this little set of rules. If I break one of them, I get punished, except he keeps changing them so I am never sure." 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. Stumble along the hall, from flower to flower, her criminal hand on my elbow, other arm against the wall. Ring on my finger. It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn't accept it, that mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now.