Genre
Fiction
Setting and Context
1970s Canada (a remote Island in Quebec)
Narrator and Point of View
There is an unnamed female narrator and the story and characters are told from her point of view.
Tone and Mood
Tone: deadpan, impassive, paranoid, suspicious, thoughtful
Mood: gloomy, anxious, wild, tense
Protagonist and Antagonist
The narrator: protagonist. Americans: antagonists.
Major Conflict
Will the narrator be able to face her past—her abortion, her parents, and their deaths? And once she has descended into primal madness, will she be able to return to the normal world?
Climax
The narrator gets a vision of her aborted child while diving, and it gives way to repressed memories of her past.
Foreshadowing
1. Joe playing with the narrator's ring foreshadows his own desire to marry her.
2. The "funny break" Anna identifies in the narrator's palm foreshadows the affair and abortion.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
1.There are numerous allusions to WWII, such as Hitler and the Holocaust.
2. The Vietnam War is occurring at the time of the novel, and Joe served in the Canadian forces (see "Other" in this Classic Note).
3. As a child, the narrator read Racine and Baudelaire: the former is Jean Racine, a 17th-century French dramatist, and the latter is a 19th-century French poet.
4. The narrator also read Robert Burns, a Scottish poet, and Thompson's "Seasons," a reference to the Scottish James Thomson's (spelled either way) series of poems.
5. When the narrator says Canadians used to think Americans were lovable, she uses the example of Dwight Eisenhower, the American president from 1952-1960.
6. David sings a snippet from "The Maple Leaf Forever," once a national anthem of Canada.
7. There are allusions to Christianity/Catholicism: God, the Devil, Christ.
Imagery
Imagery is a core component of this novel: there are images of death and decay; of water as death and rebirth; of animals, both sacrificed and free; of conception and abortion; of rot and disease; of borders and boundaries and enclosures; of creeping civilization amid the wilderness.
Paradox
1. The narrator says of her father, "The fact that he had not yet appeared only increased the likelihood that he would" (83).
2. The narrator looks through scrapbooks she made "for something I could recognize as myself" (91).
Parallelism
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
1. "What I married was a pair of boobs" (139)—David talking about Anna
Personification
1. "Joe swiveled the camera and trained it on them... sinister whirr" (137)
2. "her voice occupied the room, territorial" (156)
3. "The wind moves, rustling of tree lungs" (167)
4. "A light wind, the small waves talking against the shore, multilingual water" (184)
