Summary
Part III, Chapter 20
Joe returns to the narrator in bed. He thinks she is in pain and bends his body away from her but she touches him and he puts his arms around her. She leads him outside into the woods but keeps him close, as there is something she has protection against but he does not. He tells her he loves her and she guides him into her. It is the right time, and she can feel her lost child surfacing from the lake, forgiving her. This time she will do it alone, perhaps on a clump of dry leaves. The baby will slip out and she will lick it and bite the cord; it will be a god and she will never teach it any words. She does not want anyone to know, because they might “strap her to the death machine, emptiness machine” (165). Joe asks if she loves him but she is silent.
Chapter 21
They are in bed and she knows he thinks he has won. He is full of smiles and wants her to stay with him, but she gets up and gets dressed. Anna gives her a knowing, conspiratorial look, like she is the one who helped them get back together. Everyone thinks they can save the world—men with guns, women with their bodies.
They pack and carry the luggage down to the dock. David and Joe have the camera out and are discussing the movie. When Anna takes out her compact and looks at herself, the narrator thinks she is “locked in, she isn’t allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out” (169). She is an “imitation of a women who is also an imitation” (169).
David and Joe leave for a moment and the narrator picks up the film. She starts unwinding it. Anna tells her she better not do that but does not interfere. The film uncoils into the water. Anna regards her and says they will get her. David comes back down and she jumps into a canoe. Anna tells them what she did, and she starts paddling away.
When she looks behind her, she sees David trying to salvage the film and Joe appearing at the top of the sand cliff, running and calling her name furiously. She can tell she has been planning this but does not know for how long. She paddles into the bay, then floats for a bit. She lies down. The sun is hot and the energy of decay turns to growth. She feels her body change, “the creature in me, plant-animal, sends out filaments in me” (172).
She hears the motor of Evans’s boat in the distance. She leaves the canoe and hides, knowing they will be telling Evans some reason why she is not with them, planning a strategy for recapture or discarding. She can glimpse them looking, then conceding defeat. They are all Americans to her now.
After they leave, there is silence. She is by herself, which is what she wanted.
Chapter 22
The door is locked but that is stupid, as she cannot be kept out. She breaks a window and gets into the cabin and unpacks her things. There is nothing to do in this stillness. The power is gone right now, and she sleeps without dreams.
When she wakes, she is hungry, so she goes down to the garden. This is when she cries for the first time, accusing her parents for dying and not considering how she would feel. She yells out that she is here, but there is no answer. She can feel them, though, and is certain she can make them come out from wherever they are hiding.
Later she cooks and eats, then goes to the outhouse. The thought of the closed door scares her. The house is still safe, which is important since she does not have her power anymore. She stuffs up the windows and then goes to bed since there is nothing else to do. It starts raining and she imagines the lake rising. She smells her mother’s jacket and it smells like irrevocable loss.
She wakes in the middle of the night to silence and becomes afraid; it is like her hands will not move. Her parents want in but she cannot help them. When they return they will be different, she knows, but she was the one who called them.
Chapter 23
In the morning, she knows that some things are different now: she reverses the mirror so she cannot see it, stops brushing her hair, burns all of her illustrations, takes off her ring, rips up the scrapbooks, destroys the albums and the map, smashes all the glass, and clears a space. She keeps one blanket for the time until her fur grows.
She wets herself in the lake, takes off her clothes, and rests on the sand. The earth golds her body down as it rotates. She leaves her false body in the lake. Now she knows the gods will want more than a clothing sacrifice.
She is hungry but can no longer go back in the cabin, so she finds whatever she can in the garden. She makes a burrow near the woodpile and sleeps in small spurts like a cat.
Chapter 24
Light wakes her. Her body aches and she is hungry, but she can no longer go any closer to the cabin. She rests, watching the plants grow.
The rules continue to become clear. Her parents cannot be anywhere that is marked out or enclosed, for they can “move only in the spaces between… they are against borders” (186).
She scavenges for something else edible, knowing what is inside her will need more sustenance. Her body becomes more transparent and the forest appears as it was before people cut trees down. She thinks that animals have no need for speech, and “why talk when you are a word” (187). Now she knows she is not an animal or a tree; she is “the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place” (187).
She hears the jays crying, and sees her mother near the cabin. She is wearing the leather jacket and has her long hair of thirty years ago. Jays perch on her. The narrator feels like this is right—of course she would be there. She is cold with fear and does not want to blink for fear it will go away. Her mother senses her fear and turns toward her. The jays cry and fly up, and her mother is gone. She walks over to the spot and squints up at the birds, wondering which one her mother is.
Chapter 25
In the morning, she hears a powerboat and knows they have come for her. She hides deep in a thicket, wondering if they are Americans and the war has started. None of them can be trusted; they will mistake her for a woman and not know what she really is.
From her hiding space, she can observe them searching the cabin and the surrounding area, coming closer and closer. She is taut with fear; the power has deserted her. There are five of them, and she knows they are here to make sure she has no peace. She licks her scratches, wondering when the fur will come.
After the men leave, she stands up and makes her way back to the cabin. Hunger gnaws at her less, and she knows at some point she will not need food at all.
As she comes closer, the power returns and she has the sense that she cannot go anywhere metal has touched. In fact, she realizes, her own father was no better than a surveyor since he cut and leveled and excavated things.
Then she sees him, standing near the garden. He realizes he was an intruder when he built and fenced in things. She says “father” and he turns, but it is not him—it is “what my father saw, the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone” (193). She is not scared. It looks at her and can offer her nothing; it is only itself.
When she goes to the fence she sees their footprints, but then puts her feet in them and sees they are her own.
Chapter 26
The next morning, she realizes her parents have departed and she is the only one alive on the island. She is allowed to go back inside and marvels at the mess she made. She remembers David and Anna fondly, people she once knew. She remembers her fake husband, a selfish and kind person—altogether average.
It is clear now that she cannot stay here forever since there is not enough food. She knows she is strong enough to make it back to the village in the canoe, and even though once she gets back the Americans will be there, “possibly they can be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied” (195). There are no gods to help her now, as they have receded and gone back to the past. She will have to live in the normal way now. Her father and mother dwindle and become human, something she never gave them credit for. She tries to imagine what it was like for them out here.
She knows what people would think if they found her—that she was crazy, not just “a natural woman, state of nature” (196). She just laughs.
Chapter 27
It is clear what she must acknowledge: she is not a victim, but she also is not innocent. She re-enters her own time, but brings the new life within her.
She is outside when the boat comes. It is Paul’s, and Joe is with him. Joe gets out and starts calling her name. It is important that he is here, that he is offering her maybe “captivity in any of its forms, a new freedom?” (198). She knows that if she goes with him they will have to talk, and the words will eventually fail, but she sees now he is not an American, he is only half-formed and that is why she can trust him.
Her body tenses forward, but her feet don’t move yet. He calls again; he will not wait forever. Everything is quiet.
Analysis
In this final section, the narrator refuses to depart the island with her friends, knowing her time there is not done. She sloughs off her vestigial self, eschews all emblems of civilization, and searches for the “gift” from her mother and closure with both her parents. This journey into the depths of her psyche leads her away from her humanity; she wants to become an animal, claiming that her skin will turn to fur and making her bed in a burrow. No words are necessary anymore—only instinct and senses. By the end of the novel, though, she has faced her parents and herself, and emerges from her primal state to decide that it is best for herself and her unborn child to return to the present.
The first step in this final stage of the journey is to confront her own feelings. In the garden, she cries for the first time, but it is due to anger: “I’m not mourning, I’m accusing them, Why did you? They chose it, they had control over their death, they decided it was time to leave and they left, they set up this barrier. They didn’t consider how I would feel, who would take care of me. I'm furious because they let it happen” (176). This sentiment is also colored by her own guilt from her abortion; she too “left” her child. She then tries to settle in, but still retaining the half of herself that she considers flawed, is flustered by what to do to have her parents come to her. She senses that they want to come in the cabin but can’t, and she is stressed because “I don’t know any longer who they are; however they come back they won’t be the same, they will have changed” (178).
The next morning, things start to fall away: she turns the mirror around, both rejecting any irrelevant beauty standards and refusing to be a doubled self anymore; she burns her work and so much else because “everything from history must be eliminated” (181); she rejects clothes and the cabin and the dock and unnatural food; and, ultimately, she decides borders and boundaries are anathema and so is language itself, for “The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word” (187). Roberta Rubenstein offers analysis of these scenes: “she burns the nine years of her dead life encapsulated by marriage: her art briefcase, her wedding ring, the artifacts that must be ‘translated’ (that is, assimilated) through the purification of fire. Nine, of course, suggests the human gestation period that she never completed, either literally with her own child, or psychologically with herself. Finally, she strips completely and cleanses herself by immersion once more in the lake… By reducing herself as much as possible to a kind of animal state that is symbolically both pre-human and pre-birth, she hopes to recover the archaic language necessary to communicate with the spirits of her parents.”
Her first vision is her mother, standing with the jays. Her mother looks past her and then vanishes, and she looks up at the birds “trying to see which one she is” (188). Finally, her mother has been released to nature as she always wished. When she sees her father, she is filled with the sense that he “has realized he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations” (192). He is now “the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone” (193). After this vision also vanishes, having neither approved or disapproved of her, she acknowledges her similarity to her father: “When I go to the fence the footprints are there, side by side in the mud… I place my feet in them and find that they are my own” (193). In the morning, she knows her parents “have gone finally, back into the earth, the air, the water, wherever they were when I summoned them. The rules are over. I can go anywhere now… I am the only one left alive on the island” (194).
The narrator’s new state of existence is temporary; she will not turn into a god herself, she will not yet die. As Arnold and Cathy Davidson note, “Part of her revelation is the revelation of death — the death of parents, the cycle of life and death. She is certain that she bears within herself a new life. That life cannot thrive if she chooses to remain alone in the wilderness. She must reject the paradigm of both her father and mother and return to the city, to all that her mythic quest has just led her to abandon. Yet she can do so with a new inner strength. She has vanquished the lies that have dominated her life and has relinquished her previous false myths, presumably permanently.”
She dresses herself, cleans herself up a bit, and returns to the present; her journey is over. Now she will focus on herself and her unborn child, most likely with Joe but cognizant of the fact that she does not really need him. Susan Frommberg Schaeffer writes of the end of Surfacing: “The narrator now understands the nature of human limitation, the need to define things 'by their absence…power by its loss,' love by its failures… Knowing this, she can live, and she feels she owes that much to her parents: to live on. But first she has to give up her belief, ‘always more disastrous than the truth’... in her powerlessness, that nothing she does hurts others. She, too, is only human; she too is a victimizer.”
