The Pursuit Of Criticism In Atwood's 'Surfacing'

Surfacing works at two levels i.e. external which is the worldly pursuit of facts, and the internal, which focuses on the spiritual awareness of the protagonist. The external detective story of the narrator’s search for her father is paralleled by an internal search to discover how she has lost the ability to feel, ands the unraveling of her own mystery is the key to the redemption she seeks. The two mysteries intersect when she recognizes that “it was no longer his death but my own that concerned me” (Surfacing

107). Thus we see how Surfacing focuses on the narrator’s inner search for who she is and how she relates to the world around her. The narrator’s journey is quite incredible, taking us to the desolate island cabin of her childhood,

The narrator returns from her psychic descent into a symbolic underworld, reborn and better equipped to face challenges of remaining human amid a soul-less social order within an existentially bleak universe.

The novel grapples with the notions of national and gendered identity, anticipates rising concerns about conservation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. In this ‘mythopoetic narrative’, Atwood illustrates the contradictions rife within the human animal and invites examination of its competing physical and spiritual hungers. The narrator has marginalized the painful memories from her past and only reveals, to both the readers and her companions, what she deems necessary and right in the accepted social milieu. Thus the realistic, contemporary setting may be safe for our unnamed narrator’s physical safety but she has to struggle with the demons of her inner self and come out victorious to establish a clear sense of her

‘self.

A first reading of Surfacing may give the impression that the narrative is

Lapse, relapse, I have to forget” (45) but from her parents, and more crucially, from all emotion: “The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal” (109). She is “nothing but a head,” (109) she says. As a result, she is alienated from her historical present as well as her past. She travels to the island with her friends, Amia and David, and her current lover, Joe, but she only uses them for transportation. She does not share her past with them, and she remains detached from theirs, projecting on them her own repression of memory: “My friends’ pasts are vague to me...any one of us could have amnesia for years and the other wouldn’t notice” (26).The alienation from her friends becomes more pronounced throughout the novel, until finally she views them as “A ring of eyes, tribunal: in a minute they would join hands and dance around me, and after that the rope and the pyre, cure for heresy” (155). The narrator seems to play out her own growing crisis—the question of where she, as a highly individual