Animals
Surfacing is permeated with animal imagery. Animals and human beings are interlinked in the vision of the protagonist. Joe is consistently compared to animals; the protagonist wishes that he grow more fur. She references her aborted child as an imprisoned frog. She thinks that "an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother's stomach like a frog in jar" (28). The death of the heron becomes the death of the narrator, and when she starts to turn wild she too thinks she will grow fur.
Death
There are images of decay and death like the rotting logs in water, decomposing leaves of the forest, and the ephemeral cabin and surrounding docks, sheds, and garden. Disease is sweeping through the trees in the region. The protagonist recalls the images of her mother's death and the animals her brother killed after capturing and torturing them. These visual images are linked to her aborted child's "death," which is also connected to the discovery of her father's death.
Imprisonment
The images of imprisonment are frequent, like her brother trapping frogs and crayfish and putting them in bottles and cans. The protagonist, while going through her mother's albums, discovers that pictures can freeze people; she finds herself as a child "shut behind the paper" (108). And at the end of the novel when the narrator is alone on the island, she fears the cabin is too enclosed and she can no longer stay there.
Head
The narrator thinks there is something wrong with her, wondering, "At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head" (106). She feels bifurcated, fragmented; she is not a whole person. This image helps the reader understand her position at the beginning of the novel.
