Surfacing

by

Margaret Atwood

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Surfacing makes teaching easy.

The Brother Character Analysis

The narrator’s older brother may or may not exist: when the narrator realizes that she has been covering up the trauma of her illegal abortion with false memories, she admits that her memories of her brother were a “disguise” for thoughts about her terminated fetus. Regardless, the narrator claims to remember that her brother was obsessed with drawing space explorers and battles based on World War II (1939–1945). He also kept a “laboratory” full of small animals and insects he had captured, many of which died. When the narrator freed the survivors from his first laboratory, he became furious with her. Later, she discovered his second laboratory but was too afraid to free the captive animals again; her inaction made her feel complicit in their deaths.

The Brother Quotes in Surfacing

The Surfacing quotes below are all either spoken by The Brother or refer to The Brother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Logic and Insanity Theme Icon
).
Part 1  Quotes

Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled gray and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Father, The Brother
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
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Surfacing PDF

The Brother Quotes in Surfacing

The Surfacing quotes below are all either spoken by The Brother or refer to The Brother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Logic and Insanity Theme Icon
).
Part 1  Quotes

Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled gray and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), The Father, The Brother
Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis: