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 completely ruthless in that way . . . The white gloves: a Pontius Pilate gesture. She was washing her hands of me. Of all of us (1).
Atwood does not tell her story in a linear fashion, and she also mixes different kinds of material, different ways of telling a story, different time periods, and so on in a complex manner, allowing the reader to discover the characters as those characters discover themselves. There are a number of recurring images foreshad...