THE SYMBOLISM OF REBIRTH IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURFACING
THE SYMBOLISM OF REBIRTH IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURFACING

Summary/Abstract: The article sets out to discuss the death drive of civilization described in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and the individual possibility of rebirth she envisages The unnamed first person narrator is afraid she isn’t alive , she thinks she had allowed herself to be cut into two One aspect of this death of feeling is the discontinuity she has willed between herself and her parents, because she felt she couldn’t ever go home again after having accepted to have an abortion. She had taken refuge into telling herself lies, reshaping events into a different story. When she returns home to look for her father who has disappeared , she dives into a lake and this contact with the water produces an epiphany, a reconnection with the deepest layers of her(unconscious) self and also with the memories of her parents. The author demosnstrates that Atwood conveys the Narrator’s spiritual rebirth by the symbolic images of water/, ascent/descent and plunging/resurfacing against the general archetypal pattern of the external/internal journey. The Narrator’s rebirth does not bring with it innocence, but self knowledge and knowledge of the corrupted/imperfect world she lives in.

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