Surfacing (Identities and Issues in Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Margaret Atwood
- First Published: 1972
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: 1960’s, 1970’s, Family or family life, Self-discovery, Memory, Parents and children, Nature, Marriage, Guilt, Pregnancy, Fathers, Islands, Death or dying, Missing persons, Abortion, Canada or Canadians, Modernization, Pollution, Lakes
- Locales: Islands, Quebec, Canada
The Work
Surfacing is a dense, multilayered narrative with tantalizing symbols. Margaret Atwood’s second major novel, it was the first to gain international critical attention. Surfacing relates an unnamed narrator’s search for her missing father, presumed dead. This protagonist is also seeking her authentic identity as a woman and a spiritual being. She returns to the Canadian wilderness where her father vanished, finding its purity despoiled, desecrated by Americans heavily outfitted in hunting gear. Wild creatures struggle to survive; Canada seems a virgin...
[The entire page is 960 words long]
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