Surfacing: Identity

Margaret Atwood’s second novel Surfacing (1972) follows in the footsteps of her debut novel The Edible Woman: it also portrays a woman who undergoes a transformation, albeit a strikingly different one. The Narrator of Surfacing has no name, which I think is deliberate: she has no identity, but she could also represent something bigger – all women, all Canadians. In the novel, the Narrator, together with her boyfriend Joe and her friends, married couple Anna and David, travel to the Narrator’s family cabin next to a lake in a remote area of Quebec. There, the Narrator wants to find her […]