Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin

In Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin, a central theme is that of identity, and this theme is associated with issues of personal responsibility, perception of events, the meaning of personal relationships, and identity in terms of public perception of fame, wealth, and social position. The novel tells its story on several levels, but central to the novel is the story of Iris and her sister, Laura, with questions of identity emerging in relationship to both women. Both women speak for themselves in some degree, and in both cases it is through a literary product--Iris through the memoirs she writes, and Laura through the novel she wrote called The Blind Assassin, a novel only published after her death.

The novel begins in a cloud of ambiguity, for in spite of the seemingly direct statement made by Iris on the opening page, the novel thereafter is structured on a degree of uncertainty as to what this simple statement really means: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge" (1). Did Laura drive off accidentally, or was this a suicide? Iris believes it was a suicide; much of the town believes it was a suicide, though a police officer first suggests that the brakes failed, and though the myth has developed that this death was an accident. Iris, though, makes it clear that she believes this was a willful act:

It wasn't the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was

--it was not she but Iris who had it published, after all, as if to assert that what Laura wrote could not be true because now it was for other eyes. At the same time, the image of Laura that now exists is not quite real. It emerges from the fact of her book--her fans have a view of her that is at odds with what Iris remembers. Iris notes how she finds fans at the graveside leaving tokens or crying and wonders at it. Laura has a life beyond her span on earth because of her book, and yet that book gives a false impression. Iris suggests that this may always be the case for famous people, an idea that us apparent when she describes the statue of Colonel Henry Parkman in the town square: He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and a pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of a cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn't erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art (145). The girls are under such tyranny from their childhood, though they barely recognize the fact. Their grandmother Adelaide stands as an idea rather th

Category: Literature - M