Summary
Chapter 1
[The first-person narrator is a young woman; we do not know her name.]
She cannot believe she is on this road again. She is in David and Anna’s car—they are a married couple—and sitting beside her in the backseat is her lover Joe. As they drive, memories pop into her head of her parents, and she wonders if her father is dead or alive.
Anna is the narrator’s closest female friend, but they’ve only known each other for two months. She and David are accompanying the narrator because David and Joe are working on a film they’ve titled Random Samples and they think they could get some interesting footage. David is the director though he does not have any training.
They stop to look at a tourist site, the Bottle Villa, then get back in the car. Now they enter the narrator’s home territory and she smells the mill, the sawdust, and the lumber. They do not have a map because the narrator thinks they do not need one, but they have to stop at the corner store and ask where to go because the old road is not there anymore. Nothing seems to be the same and the narrator grows anxious about it. She wishes she could turn around and not find out what happened to her father. That's why she is here, after all—to find out what happened to him.
They take the new road but sometimes the old road crosses it. They are nearly to the village and the narrator is surprised how fast it was; in the past it felt like suffering to get here, with vomit from driving on rocky roads.
Chapter 2
They stop at a motel with a bar and the narrator says she is going out on her own. The others are a little relieved, and stay to drink beer. The narrator is glad that they have a car so she could get here, and she likes and trusts them, but she knows they do not understand why she is here. They disowned their parents a long time ago, and they do not get why she is looking for her father.
She thinks of how she had a good childhood and was not aware of what was going on with WWII and the Holocaust (but her brother told her later). Now she walks through the familiar village and waits for nostalgia to hit. There are more boats than cars parked, which means it is a bad season.
She arrives at Paul’s place. He and his wife Madame are good friends of the family, though it does not seem like he recognizes her at first. But then he does, and greets her and she asks if her father has come back. He says no, but reminds her that her father knows the bush. Madame makes tea for them all and she marvels at how they look like the carvings they sell in the handicraft shops—or do the carvings look like them? She remembers the times they came and visited as a family; they always exchanged vegetables from their gardens like it was a ritual.
Madame sighs that her mother was a good woman and it is sad that she died so young. The narrator had visited her mother in the hospital when she was dying. Her mother had concealed the pain for weeks, hating hospitals and doctors, but then it was too late. Her mother did not seem to know her when the narrator saw her on her deathbed. The narrator told her she was not going to her funeral; she wanted her mother to approve in advance. She noticed her mother’s diary, and, flipping through it, saw that she never recorded any emotions throughout the years, just what the weather was and what they did that day.
The narrator asks Paul what happened to her father and he shrugs that he is just gone; Paul had stopped by his house one day and the door was open and the boat was still there, and it was the same the next day so he began to worry. He locked up her father’s place and brought the car here. Her father always thought “Paul justified for him his own ideal of the simple life; but for Paul the anachronism was imposed, he’d never chosen it” (19).
Paul explains that he and the police have looked all over but have seen nothing. He asks if her husband is here and she says yes, knowing he thinks a man should be here and doing these things. Joe is not her husband but he is a stand-in that will work. She is still wearing her ring; she never threw it out and obviously her parents mentioned the wedding to Paul but not the divorce. She is waiting for Madame to ask about the baby and she will tell her she left it in the city, but that is not the truth—he is in a different city with her former husband.
Madame does not ask, though, and a memory comes to her of her former husband. She does not have time for this and blocks it. Paul’s letter saying her father is gone and nobody can find him comes to her mind.
She says she will go down to the lake and Paul says they already looked three times. She thinks it will be different if she looks herself. Maybe when she gets back her father will be at the cabin, waiting for her.
Chapter 3
On her way back to the motel, she stops at a store and gets food for the group. There used to only be one store run by a woman who only had one hand, and she always wondered what happened but never asked. Now she cannot remember what the rest of her looked like—just the stump of an arm.
Back at the bar, the others introduce her to Claude, a boy whose father owns the place. David begins telling them that Claude says business is bad right now because the lake is overfished. He assumes a more yokel dialect like he is trying to prove he is a man of the people. He also teaches Communications at an Adult Education school, where Joe works as well; perhaps “communications” is what he is doing.
Joe asks if there is any news of her father and she says no in a calm, level tone. Maybe that is what he likes about her—her cool demeanor. She cannot remember much about their first meeting except it was in a corner store and then they went and had coffee. He told her later he liked how she took off and put on her clothes like she had no emotion, but she secretly thought to herself that she really didn’t have any.
She says she would like to go down to the lake for a couple days to look around, and her friends agree. David says he wants to catch a fish. If her father is safe, she does not want to see him, as her parents never understood about the divorce or even the marriage, but she did not understand it herself. They also did not understand why she left the child but she could not explain how it was never really hers anyway.
Claude tells them they can hire Evans to take them out to the cabin. Paul would take them for free, she knows, but she does not want him to misinterpret the men’s longish hair and beards and think they are trouble.
David drives them down to the cabins where Evans works. He is a laconic American, and he does not mention her father’s disappearance. David calls him groovy. She can tell David is enjoying himself, thinking this is reality: “a marginal economy and grizzled elderly men, it’s straight out of Depression photo essays” (26).
Evans takes them and their supplies out on the boat. When they get to the middle of the lake she turns around like she always did and there is the village in the distance. Now the feeling of homesickness comes upon her, ironically for a “place where I never lived” (26).
Anna remarks that it is good to get away from the city for a bit. It starts to drizzle and she thinks of how the lake is tricky, for the weather shifts quickly and people drown every year. Evans guides them into the narrator’s territory. The house is camouflaged behind the trees but she knows where it is.
They pull up to the dock where her brother drowned. He got out of the enclosure where he played and her mother was alone in the house and checked on him and he was not there, so she went down to the water and saw her brother under the water, face upturned, unconscious. This was before the narrator was born but she can remember it clearly as if she saw it.
Chapter 4
David pays Evans after they unload and he guides the boat away. It is quiet now, and the others seem like they are waiting for the narrator to tell them what to do. She says to take the supplies up. They do so, and she looks at the familiar house, trees, sand bank, and chicken wire fence. She thinks of how her father would have wanted a dynasty like Paul but she could have never brought the child here since it was never hers. It was her husband’s and she was only an incubator. He wanted a replica of himself, though she could not prove it because he always said he loved her.
The house is smaller than she remembers and grayer too. She opens the padlock with the keys Paul gave her. She hopes there is a clue inside. She sees the bed where her mother languished; she remembers that she always thought her mother would recover from anything and was disappointed in her that she died.
The others are surprised by the remoteness of this place but it is not weird to the narrator. She looks around for something like a note or a will but there is nothing; it does not seem like a house that has been lived in. She lights a fire and grabs a knife to go to the garden.
The garden has been rearranged since she was last there and the crop is paltry. Anna comes out looking for the toilet. She asks if the narrator is okay and she says sure, surprised by the question. Anna says she is sorry they did not find her father, her eyes big as if it is “her grief, her catastrophe” (33).
The narrator makes dinner and hopes her friends will not be bored, as there is not much here. There are only a few technical and reference books, old paperbacks, and a few classics. The narrator suggests playing bridge but they do not want to. David pulls out the weed and they smoke outside. David says this is better than the city, wishing they could kick out the fascist Yanks and the capitalists.
The narrator is glad the others are with her because if she were alone the vacancy and the loneliness would overtake her. David starts to talk about the dead animals this country was built on and Anna chastises him for lecturing and tells him they aren’t his students. She strokes his face lovingly and the narrator wonders what their secret is. They have been married nine years and the narrator remembers how when she got married her husband changed and started expecting things from her.
Joe puts his arm around her. It is chilly and the voices of the loons echo everywhere.
Analysis
One of Atwood’s earliest and lesser-known novels, Surfacing is a dense, complex, and often uncomfortable look at contemporary (1970s) feminism; the workings of the mind and memory; the relationship between Canada and the U.S.; nature vs. civilization; fairy tale, myth, and the hero(ine)’s journey; and much more. With powerful imagery and often obscure symbolism, the unnamed female narrator takes us into the recesses of her mind, providing us with a narrative we assume to be true and then, later, complicating it and ultimately revealing it to be mostly false.
As many critics have noted, the novel follows the path of the hero’s journey, a theory argued by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). Throughout these analyses, we will touch on various aspects of this mythic archetype, beginning here at, of course, the beginning: the narrator is traveling back to the past, the place where she grew up, on a quest to find her father and to put her demons at rest. She is accompanied by her peers—her lover and a married couple of friends—but she is essentially on her own; several times she wishes they were not there, or insists on doing things on her own because she knows they will not understand.
Her complicated relationship with her home, a remote outpost at a lake in Quebec, becomes clear as the group drives in. She notes paradoxically that it is her “home ground, foreign territory” (7) and “Nothing is the same anymore, I don’t know the way anymore” (8). The changes wrought in her childhood home are profoundly disturbing to her, but it was her choice to stay away. Writing about the novel’s use of the heroic journey archetype, Josie P. Campbell writes that the narrator is “an unlikely hero, or at best reluctant, almost preferring not to find [her father], having dissociated herself from her family because of an event in her life which she cannot share with them, indeed cannot face herself. Her separation from her family is further emphasized by her guilt over her mother, who had died earlier of a brain tumor. The narrator could not bear to attend the funeral, perhaps her way of not accepting her mother's death and her guilt for not allowing her mother to die in nature…”
The reader has the task of keeping up with the “surfacing” of the narrator’s memories, whether they are of her childhood or her more recent past with her husband and child. These memories surface unbidden most of the time, and sometimes she allows them to suffuse her consciousness while other times she sends them back to the depths. Memories seem to haunt her; Atwood remarked that Surfacing was a ghost story, and that "You can have the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one's own self which has split off and that to me is the most interesting kind and that is obviously the tradition I'm working.”
All of this she does in a deadpan, impassive tone, and as Meera T. Clark notes, “She is careful merely to state empirical facts. As she takes the reader along with her on her quest, she records with detachment all that she observes on the wayside… This meticulous observation of facts comes naturally to her. Her parents… have stubbornly guarded their reason and enlightenment in the encroaching French Canadian jungle.” As we move further into the novel, however, we will learn to see the emotion, symbolism, and myth behind her words, and come, like the narrator, to distrust words and logic.
