Essay Questions

The Blind Assassin is a novel that revolves around violence, oppression, and death. Support this statement with illustrations from Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name.

The novel, Blind Assassin, is a one that spans themes and shrouded with mystery deaths at the same time. Margaret Atwood opens the story with the death of Laura, Iris’ sister. Laura’s death, like most of the deaths in the novel, is cloaked in mystery and clandestine. The three death that opens the story provides an accurate depiction of the desire by humans to find meaning in practicing violence and fatalities. The deaths are self-inflicted and appear to be in retort to specific practices of vehemence. In the novel, Laura, after learning of the death of Alex Thomas, a man with whom she had been secretly in love with, in world war II, also decides to kill herself by ultimately driving off the bridge.

On the other hand, Aimee, who is also the daughter to Iris, develops drug abuse problems, a situation that can, in part, be attributed to her exposure to violence at such a young age. In particular, Richard, who is also Aimee’s father, rapes her aunt Laura and forces her aunt to get an abortion. Additionally, Aimee suffers the effects of her aunt and father’s suicides. Atwood explores the inescapable and recurrent nature of violence and suicide, as their progression results to even more death and destruction. Also, world war I and II play a splendid role in presenting a world in which violence is dominant. The novel can thus be argued as the author’s exploration of violence, oppression, and death.

The Blind Assassin is ideally a story of doomed love. Illustrate the truthfulness of this statement using illustrations from Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.

Margaret Atwood, in The Blind Assassin, presents, like in many literary novels with a focus on love, not a tale of happy and ultimately secure unions of people but rather sheds light on and irradiates the different ways in which love is thwarted and disillusioned by such factors as sexism, violence, infidelity, and separation due wars and death.

Atwood presents the doomed love of Iris and Alex in the fictional novel The Blind Assassin by Iris, in which the characters are epitomized as the anonymous man and woman. The love between this couple is constantly threatened because not only is Iris ( the woman) married, but the man (Alex) is also on a constant run after being caught up in one of the riots that happened in a factory belonging to Iris’ father. This particular story is just an example of the doomed love that fills the pages of the novel, which happens to have a lot of this tragic romance. Iris and Alex’s story only being the dominant one.