Journey of the Self
The narrator initially gives off the impression that she has a strong sense of self, but as the novel progresses, we see that self for what it is—malformed, fragile, a lie. She ostensibly undergoes a journey to find her missing father, but she also undertakes a journey to figure out where she came from, why she made the choices she did, what she values, and what she wants for herself moving forward.
Gender
While Surfacing putatively takes place in a feminist time (the 1970s), Atwood depicts the reality of the era: patriarchy still reigns supreme. The women in the novel are still treated as inferior—David is cruelly misogynist to Anna, who blindly obeys nearly all stereotypical expectations of women; Joe sexually assaults the narrator and David simply expects she will sleep with him; Paul assumes there needs to be a man with the narrator to take care of the search for her father since women are fragile, weak, and cannot handle danger; David and Anna claim the narrator "hates men" because she did not want to sleep with David; the narrator's art professor told her women could not be fine artists; and many more. The narrator grapples with whether or not she is a victim, what it means to be be independent and live a life on her own terms, and the connection between womanhood and the natural world.
Sanity and Madness
There is a fine, fungible line between sanity and madness in this novel. The narrator initially seems to be reliable, aware of herself, and able to accurately assess the situation she is in and the motivations of the people around her. However, as time passes, there is observable slippage in her memory and in her grasp of reality—she claims things about herself are true and we find out they are not, she becomes paranoid about everyone around her, she decides her parents have messages and gifts for her, and, at the end of the novel, she completely loses her grip on reality and becomes like an animal. However, she not only maintains a convincing narration of the rightness of what she is doing, but also rather quickly comes out of that state; this poses the questions of whether or not she is really mad, why women often receive the label of "mad," and who we are to even critique another's sanity in the first place.
Logic vs. Mystery
The narrator's father is an avowedly rational, logical man; he decries organized religion and has a strict code of behavior and belief that governs his life (and his children's lives). In contrast, her mother is more of a child of nature, imbued with mystery and spirituality. As a child, the narrator seems to have tried to be more like her father, and such an attitude carried into her adult life. But after her visionary quest, the narrator is eventually able to reconcile both of these worldviews, realizing that what she admired in her father could actually be somewhat deleterious, and that she needed what her mother modeled for her.
Memory
Atwood presents a complicated look at memory, interrogating how it interrupts the present and can make a person lose touch with who they are in the moment, how it can be a construction and not a reality, and how it can, if invoked properly, lead to a healthy sense of self. With the latter, this comes about for the narrator only after a painful visionary quest that forces her to dismantle the false memories she nourished for so long and to treat fairly the memories of her parents and herself.
Americanism
The four main characters profess to hate the Americans, but it isn't just the actual people from that country—it is the American ethos and attitude, the characteristics that are irrevocably seeping North. Americanism is a callous disregard for nature; a gluttonous and rapacious view of the world; an oppressive masculinity; a zeal for showmanship and spectacle; and a lust for violence.
The Fallibility of Language
The narrator is laconic from the beginning of the novel, and increasingly comes to believe that language is problematic and must be sloughed off. Words lie, deceive, confuse; for much of the novel we believe the narrator's words about her life, but they turn out to be mostly lies. They create boundaries and borders and confinements, such as when Joe demands she tell him she loves him. And they fail to express the truth of feeling or encompass the entirety of a situation, clearly seen in the numerous times the narrator remains silent or struggles to respond when queried. As she immerses herself in her quest, she believes she is turning into an animal and then simply dissolving into the natural world, and steadfastly maintains that she has no need for words anymore. At the end of the novel, she contemplates returning to the real world, but even then, she does not yet use her words to respond to Joe's call. Overall, Atwood suggests language must be reinvented, used responsibly, and supplemented with the visionary and the physical.
