Identity In Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

ther is external and it has layered with internal search of her identity. As the story generates, the protagonist analyses her life and personal causes for her fate. “The scene of mystery is strewn with false clues from her fictitious memories which she created to shield herself from the pain of confronting her true past” (Christ, Margaret). The finding of answer for her father’s mystery awakens her to the strength that activates her, about her husband, marriage, child, divorce and abortion. The story starts when the unnamed narrator goes with her boyfriend Joe and a newly married couple David and Anna to Quebec island of wilderness. The past of the narrator with marriage, abortion and divorce is intolerable to her own self. It is sure that the protagonist has never been married and it is a critical situation. She is an unmarried woman. She is in love affair with a married man, an art professor in college and the affair has ended when he has approached her to abort the child as an act of love. All her sweet memories of her marriage

For the protagonist, the identity becomes critical becomes of her place as a victim of colonial forces. She is grown up in the patriarchal society and colonized by men and their cultural imperialism with the effects of English and French though they have gone. Margaret Atwood marks “Americanism” which considers natural world as economic one and exploits nature for the extending the borders of the country. She returns to the Canadian island and notices that Americans are exploiting the island. Men reflect the images of victimization of Canada by America as victimization of narrator. Americans consider her as Canada with innocence, wilderness, and