Surfacing Essay Questions

What is the nature of David and Anna's relationship?

David and Anna initially seem to have a satisfying, successful marriage, but as the novel progresses, that image erodes. They both cheat on each other and claim the other one wants to leave. David is openly derisive of Anna, lamenting marrying someone as unintelligent as her and claiming she bamboozled him into it; his misogyny becomes more conspicuous as the couple's stay in the wilderness lengthens. He has most of the power in their relationship, but she also knows what buttons of his to push. Eventually the narrator realizes that they are drawn together more in their hate than their love, but that that might still be a powerful enough force to sustain their relationship.

Why does the narrator find herself "complicit" in what she deems "Americanism?"

Though she did not, for example, leave trash on the island or kill the heron or burn the "bad" leeches, the narrator comes to realize she has been complicit in the suffering of innocent creatures and the destruction of nature. She observed her brother's cruel behavior and did nothing to stop him; she used frogs to bait fish; she benefited from, however tenuously, the cutting down of trees and building of cabins and new roads. She finally moves past the delusion that she had sustained of her own childhood innocence. As Carol P. Christ notes, "Her association of power with evil and her dissociation of herself from both reflect a typical female delusion of innocence, which hides her complicity in evil and feeds her false belief that she can do nothing but witness her victimization. In order to regain her power the protagonist must realize that she does not live in a world where only others have power or do evil."

Is the novel anti-abortion?

Clearly the narrator is tormented by her past abortion, repressing its painful memories and, when she allows those memories to surface, describes the event in cold, clinical, invasive terms. She even endeavors to get pregnant again, so is it fair to claim that the novel espouses an anti-abortion view? In short, that is unlikely. The novel is a classically feminist text, and Atwood seems to be suggesting that feminism is supposed to include women who want to have children, women who have an abortion and know it's the right thing but still feel any number of emotions about it. The narrator makes a choice to have a child, just like she made a choice not to have one (we must acknowledge her lover did seem to pressure her to have the procedure).

What does the narrator discover about her father?

The narrator learns her father has died, but she also learns that he was not an innocent (she acknowledges the way he interacted with nature led to suffering and artificiality) and that his way of looking at the world is not ideal and must be complemented by the more malleable and intuitive worldview of her mother. Arnold and Cathy Davidson explain that after the narrator realizes her father is dead, "she can then release herself from her father — from his logic, his concept of an ordered universe, and even from her suspicion that his rationalism has given way, in the immediate past, to an insanity which may have always been present in his obsessive retreat from the rest of the world. More to the point, she can begin to re-discover herself only after she has become, both literally and symbolically, an orphan."

Why does Atwood call Surfacing a "ghost story"?

Atwood likens this novel to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a novella in which the reader discovers that the ghosts the narrator claims are haunting her are actually figments of her repressed imagination. Here, the narrator of Surfacing is also dealing with ghosts—her mother, her father, and her aborted fetus. She struggles to lay them to rest; they return to her in troubling memories and visions, and it becomes her quest to make peace with them so she can become whole again.