Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Surfacing, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Logic and Insanity
Binaries and Violence
Love, Sex, and Marriage
Religion and Family
Art
Summary
Analysis
The narrator is astonished to be on the road passing out of the city again. The city is rundown, with only two restaurants. In one restaurant during the war, her brother felt the waitress’s legs because he’d never seen the kind of nylons she had on—the narrator’s mother didn’t wear them. Another year, the narrator and her brother had no shoes, so they wrapped their feet in blankets and the brother pretended Germans had “shot [their] feet off.”
The narrator’s childhood memories introduce two major issues in the novel: the influence of childhood family experiences on adult psychology and questions of “enemies.” As a child, the narrator’s brother is shocked by a woman wearing nylons, a kind of tights, because his mother—his standard for female behavior—doesn’t wear them. Meanwhile, the reference to the war and to German enemies indicates that the narrator grew up during World War II (1939 – 1945), during which Canada was one of the Allied powers fighting against the Axis, which included Nazi Germany. During World War II, a clear binary existed between allies and enemies that may no longer exist in the narrator’s life in the present.
Themes
The narrator sits in the back of David and Anna’s car with Joe, who fidgets with her gold ring. Anna, who reads palms, once asked the narrator whether she had a twin due to her doubled palm lines; Anna said the narrator had a good childhood but with a “break.” The narrator thinks that Joe resembles a buffalo: “the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.”
Gold rings usually suggest marriage, but it isn’t clear whether the narrator and Joe are a married couple. Anna’s question about the “break” in the narrator’s good childhood may foreshadow revelations about a difficult family history. Meanwhile, when the narrator compares Joe to “a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction,” she may be alluding to gender politics during second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s: men once felt “dominant,” but women’s increasing demands for equality make them feel “threatened with extinction.”
Themes
The car has passed multiple towns claiming to be “GATEWAY TO THE NORTH.” The narrator’s father used to say that the north only contained the past. No one knows whether her father is alive. The narrator thought that she could leave home, come back, and find her parents unchanged, but she left her return too long because she was avoiding “explanations.”
The narrator’s assumption that her parents would remain unchanged with time shows her childish, unrealistic attitude toward them. When she mentions that she was avoiding “explanations,” it suggests that she did something in the past that she did not want to explain to her parents.
Themes
As the car passes an old U.S. Army base—probably empty but, the narrator speculates, perhaps secretly occupied—David says, “Bloody fascist pig Yanks.” Early in the drive, Anna sang songs, but David began whistling, so she went quiet. Though the narrator and Anna have known each other for two months, the narrator thinks of Anna as her “best woman friend.”
Though the U.S. and Canada were allies during World War II (1939–1945), David’s casual reference to U.S. soldiers as “fascist pig Yanks” suggests Canadian distaste for the U.S.’s hegemonic power during the Cold War (1945–1991) after World War II. David’s decision to begin whistling over his wife’s singing indicates a passive-aggressive attempt to make her be quiet, hinting at tension in their marriage. Finally, the narrator’s admission that Anna is her “best woman friend” even though they’ve known one another a short time reveals that the narrator is quite socially isolated.
Themes
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The narrator tells David that “the bottle house” is up ahead. David’s directing a movie, Random Samples, featuring various items they encounter. Joe is the cameraman. Though he has no experience, David has declared they can teach themselves: “they’re the new Renaissance men.” David stops at the house made of soda bottles, which Joe films. The drive resumes.
The term “Renaissance man” refers to someone with self-taught expertise across a wide variety of subjects. Of course, the term is implicitly gendered: it’s Renaissance man, not Renaissance person. Notably, David asked Joe to teach himself to be a cameraman rather than asking Anna or the narrator, hinting that David may have a somewhat sexist view according to which men can be competent self-taught artists but women cannot.
Themes
The car passes a sign, riddled by hunters’ bullets, that reads “BIENVENUE” AND “WELCOME.” It enters a company town with a fountain decorated by “a cherub with part of the face missing.” The car encounters a blocked road. The car doubles back to the corner store, where the narrator learns that the old road is closed—they’ll have to take the new one. The narrator, horrified by the changes, suddenly never wants to find out what happened to her father.
The bilingual English-French signage indicates that the narrator is entering Quebec in Canada. The highly specific description of the foundation with the damaged cherub implies that that detail will be important later in the narrative but does not reveal how. Finally, the narrator seems to connect changes in her childhood village with a terrible fate for her father, which indicates that she is resistant to the idea of her parents changing.
Themes
At the new road’s turnoff, David briefly stops to film stuffed moose dressed as people at a gas station. In places, the old road crosses the new road, and the narrator remembers how her father would drive the old road so fast that she vomited. When they reach the lake, the narrator feels as if she “cheated” because she’s not seeing it through “a haze of vomit.”
The stuffed moose dressed as people represent how human beings can treat deadly violence against animals as a whimsical joke, while the narrator’s feeling that she “cheated” because she arrived at the village without vomiting shows her superstitious desire that the present adhere to her childhood memories, even when they’re unpleasant.
Themes
In town, the narrator leaves David, Anna, and Joe at a motel. She couldn’t have made the trip without David and Anna’s car, but they and Joe cut off their parents like “you are supposed to” and can’t understand the narrator’s motives for the trip. She walks through the village to Paul’s house. She finds Paul in his garden and thanks him for writing; he realizes who she must be and invites her in. Paul’s wife, Madame, makes tea, and the narrator recalls how her mother talked to Madame—though her mother spoke almost no French and Madame almost no English—while her father and Paul swapped gifts of vegetables.
The narrator’s claim that “you are supposed to” disown your parents reveals that she’s part of a social scene where family ties and family history are viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, the narrator has come looking for her missing father, showing her to be an outlier in her social group.
Themes
Madame says something to Paul in French. Paul translates: Madame thinks it’s sad that the narrator’s mother died at her age. The narrator remembers visiting her mother in the hospital. Her mother delayed going until she couldn’t walk, fearing—correctly—that the doctors would extend her painful life though her illness was “terminal.” At the hospital, the narrator, looking for her mother’s approval, said she wouldn’t attend the funeral. Her mother, on morphine, replied that she didn’t like “them” because she didn’t enjoy liquor or wearing hats. The narrator thought perhaps she was talking about “church or cocktail parties.”
The anecdote about the narrator’s mother’s terminal illness invites readers to question the supposed “logic” of widely accepted customs, like prolonging a person’s life even though it’s bound to be painful. Is this really the most ethical course of action, particularly when the patient doesn’t want to prolong their life? Meanwhile, the narrator’s mother’s statement that she doesn’t like “them”—which might refer to funerals, churches, or cocktail parties, all of which can involve drinking and wearing hats—shows the associative logic of certain altered mental states.
Themes
The narrator asks Paul about her father. Paul replies that he visited her father and found him simply gone. The narrator asks whether he checked to see if boats were gone from the island. Paul assures her that he and the police looked but found nothing. Then he asks whether her husband is here. The narrator privately concludes that Paul thinks a man should be handling the situation and that her parents, to whom she sent a postcard after her wedding, must have mentioned it to Paul. Luckily, she never got rid of her ring, and her parents must not have mentioned the divorce: Joe can be a “stand-in.” She waits for Madame to ask about the baby, whom she left with her husband—but Madame doesn’t.
If the narrator is correct that Paul assumes a man should handle the narrator’s situation, then his reaction characterizes the narrator’s home village as conservative and sexist. Her subsequent thoughts suggest that the gold ring she wears is a wedding ring, which she wears despite her divorce to navigate conservative social environments where it’s hard to be an unmarried woman.
Themes
The narrator couldn’t believe that her father had just disappeared when she received Paul’s letter stating as much, but she realizes that’s what happened. Wanting guidance, she looks to a barometer on the wall: it’s shaped like a married couple in a house—the man’s exit from the house predicts rain while the woman’s predicts good weather. The barometer gives the narrator no “prediction.” She announces that she’ll go down to the lake. Paul has looked there, but the narrator is certain she’ll find something if she does it herself.
When the narrator looks to the barometer on the wall for a “prediction” not of the weather but of the future, it hints at her tendency to rely on magical thinking and potential mental instability.
Themes
After Paul’s, the narrator stops into a store to buy food. She returns to the motel to find Joe, Anna, and David at the bar, being waited on by a boy named Claude. David informs the narrator that Claude has told them tourism is bad this year because of rumors the lake is fished out. As David talks, he puts on a rural accent—a self-parody of himself in the 1950s, back when he worked as a Bible salesman to fund his attendance at theological seminary. Now he teaches Communications in an Adult Education program.
Back in the 1950s, a decade associated with conservatism and social conformity, David was a religious believer. Now, in the late 1960s or early 1970s—decades associated with counter-culturalism—David has left the church and become a secular professor. This backstory suggests that David tends to change his values and beliefs according to the society around him rather than acting according to some authentic inner values.
Themes
Joe asks the narrator what she learned, his tone communicating that he’d rather she stay unemotional. Neutrally, the narrator explains that she learned nothing. She recalls that Joe once told her that he liked how “cool” she was after the first time they had sex, putting her clothes back on in a businesslike way—but the narrator just didn’t feel anything.
The anecdote about the first time the narrator and Joe had sex suggests that Joe wants the narrator to pretend emotional coolness for him but not actually to be cool—implying that Joe may end up unhappy with the narrator’s actual lack of emotion.
Themes
The narrator tells the others that she’d like to visit the lake for a couple days. David is enthusiastic—he wants to fish, and he brought a fishing rod. He did this even though the narrator told them all that if her father were present they would leave without contacting her father: her parents never forgave her for divorcing her husband and abandoning her child. David buys a fishing license from Claude, who tells them that they can hire a man named Evans to take them to the lake.
If the narrator is correct that her parents never forgave her for divorcing, it suggests that her parents clung to a conservative, perhaps misogynistic cultural logic according to which women should try to save their marriages no matter what.
Themes
David and the others drive to Evans’s office. Evans, an American, agrees to boat them to the island and pick them up in two days. They park David’s car at Evans’s dock and board the boat. On the water, the narrator is watchful—she doesn’t trust Evans in the lake, where people drown every year—but Evans gets them to her family’s old dock, which her brother once fell off and drowned, though her mother saved him. Though the drowning occurred before the narrator was born, the narrator remembers it. She believes that unborn babies “can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a frog in a jar.”
The narrator’s claim that unborn children “can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach” again reveals her idiosyncratic, magical view of the world, while her comparison of an unborn child to “a frog in a jar” shows her implicit rejection of the human/animal binary.
Themes
Evans leaves his passengers on the dock and boats away. The narrator tells the others that they’ll carry their things to the cabin. In front of the cabin are a fence and a swing. The narrator wonders whether her parents keeping the swing means they expected grandchildren, but she feels that she could never have brought her baby here, as she felt no ownership of the baby: her husband “imposed” it on her. He wanted her to produce a child and afterward was done with her, but he hid it by claiming to love her.
Whereas readers may think of love as a positive phenomenon, the narrator believes that her husband used declarations of love as a weapon, using them to cover up his “impos[ition]” of a baby on her and his actual lack of care for her.
Themes
The narrator unlocks the cabin and enters. Joe, Anna, and David follow. Joe asks whether she grew up here, and Anna comments that the isolation must have been “weird.” When the narrator claims it wasn’t weird, David supports her, saying that it all “depends what you’re used to”—but the narrator can tell he’s “uncertain.” She checks the cabin’s living room and two bedrooms. She notices some papers beside a lamp on a shelf in the living room and wonders whether her father left some message for her; she expected him to contact her after her mother’s death, but he didn’t.
David’s claim that weirdness “depends on what you’re used to” suggests relativism about cultural logics: what makes no sense to an urbanite might make perfect sense to a rural person. Yet he’s “uncertain” about his own claim, which suggests the possibility that even people who purport to have relativist views secretly believe their own logical systems to be universal and correct.
Themes
The narrator tells the others she’s going to the garden. In the garden she gathers vegetables. Anna comes out and asks where the bathroom is; the narrator directs her to the outhouse. When the narrator washes the vegetables in the lake, she sees “the good kind [of leech] with dots on the back”; perhaps because of the war, her brother in childhood categorized everything into good and evil types. Back in the cabin, the narrator makes dinner, and they eat. Afterwards, she isn’t sure what to do. The cabin contains books: detective novels and her father’s favorite “eighteenth-century rationalists,” whom he considered “paragons.” The narrator liked the rationalists better when she learned how many of them were screw-ups.
The narrator’s anecdote about her brother categorizing everything into a “good kind” and a bad kind illustrates how logical systems can be internally consistent without having any objective truth. Moreover, such binary logical systems tend to sort people and things into “good” and “bad” camps, leading to violence against the “bad” camp. Juxtaposed with the narrator’s memory of her father’s passion for the “eighteenth-century rationalists”—broadly, thinkers who believed that human reason could understand and explain all phenomena—the narrator seems to imply that philosophical rationalism is just as random as sorting leeches into good and bad types.
Themes
David pulls marijuana from his pack. The group goes to the dock and smokes. David talks about what a perfect country Canada would be if only they could get rid of the Americans. When the narrator asks how he would get rid of them, he jokes that he would train beavers to chew them to death. Though it’s not a good joke, the narrator laughs. When David expounds on how Canada was “build on the bodies of dead animals,” Anna tells him to lie down.
David’s performative hatred of Americans illustrates the human tendency to cling to hierarchical binaries like native/foreigner. His argument that Canada was “built on the bodies of dead animals” suggests another binary, human/animal, leading to violence against the “lesser” term in the binary.
Themes
Watching David and Anna, the narrator wonders whether Anna knows some secret to marriage that she doesn’t—she thought her marriage would work out, but everything changed for the worse after the wedding. Joe puts his arm around the narrator, and she remembers a houseboat she used to see floating on the lake. She thought living that way would be excellent—you’d have everything you needed, and moving on would be easy.
When the narrator wonders whether Anna knows a secret to marriage that she doesn’t, it shows that the narrator still believes marriage can be a positive experience at least for some people, despite the failure of her own marriage.
Themes
The next morning, the narrator wakes up, examines the sleeping Joe, and wonders whether she loves him. She wants to know the answer before he asks about it. Truthfully, she wishes that Joe was more significant to her, but after divorcing her husband, she hasn’t felt as strongly about anyone: “divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you.”
When the narrator provocatively compares divorce to “an amputation,” she may be hinting that she suffered some physical harm in the course of separating from her husband. Her claim that here is “less of” her after her divorce, on the other hand, hints that she lost the emotional capacity to love when her marriage failed.
Themes
The narrator and Joe are sleeping in the narrator’s old room. Below her childhood drawings on the walls, the narrator sees her mother’s gray leather jacket hanging from a nail. The narrator goes into the living room, where Anna is putting on makeup. She tells Anna she doesn’t need makeup at the cabin. Anna says that David hates her not to wear it and then, contradictorily, that he doesn’t know she wears makeup.
Though the narrator believes Anna and David have a good marriage, Anna feels compelled to wear make-up—which hides what women naturally look like, conforming their appearances to an unnatural ideal—either because David dislikes that Anna doesn’t conform to that ideal, or because he’s never realized she doesn’t naturally conform to that ideal. The tension and deception in Anna’s justification suggest that her marriage to David is harder than the narrator realizes.
Themes
While the narrator makes breakfast, David comes in, and he and Anna joke about Anna’s foul mouth. The narrator thinks that in French, swear words are religious, while in English, they’re body parts, because people swear by what they fear. As a schoolchild, she learned about religion on the playground “the way most children then learned about sex,” while she told the others about reproduction.
The narrator implies that “most children then learned about sex” on the playground because their parents felt that they shouldn’t know about sex; if she learned about religion in the same way, it implies that her parents told her about sex but feared to explain religion to her.
Themes
After breakfast, the narrator, Anna, David, and Joe go look for the narrator’s father along the trail near the lake. The narrator recalls how (while doing the dishes earlier) she asked Anna the secret of her marriage. Anna said it was about making an emotional commitment despite not knowing the outcome. When Anna asks about the narrator’s marriage, the narrator says that perhaps she was too young. Anna says it’s a good thing the narrator didn’t have children. The narrator hasn’t told Anna or Joe about her baby; she thinks she has to act like the baby never happened because for her “it doesn’t exist […] it was taken away from me.” In the present, the explorers come to a dead end in the trail and turn back.
Anna’s claim that marriage is about making a commitment without knowing the outcome suggests that marriage is fundamentally a gamble—a matter of accepting risk. Previously, the narrator claimed that she abandoned her baby with her husband. Now, however, she claims that her baby “was taken away from” her. By contradicting herself, she reveals that she may be an unreliable, unstable narrator.
Themes
The narrator feels she has fulfilled her obligations to her father. While Anna suntans, reading, and David and Joe go canoeing, the narrator tries to do some work. The narrator wanted to be a “real artist,” but her husband—before the marriage—told her there had never been real female artists and she should do something she could monetize, so she became an illustrator. Currently she’s illustrating a translated children’s book called Quebec Folk Tales. Due to her publisher’s qualms about what parents will buy, the narrator self-censors to keep any of the drawings from being too frightening. She can mimic any artistic style and does mannered drawings for the children’s books.
If art can either reinforce or subvert social hierarchies, the narrator’s husband used art history to reinforce the male/female hierarchy, claiming women couldn’t be “real artists” and encouraging the narrator to compromise her ambitions. This anecdote shows how loving relationships can be weaponized: the narrator implicitly compromised her ambitions because she loved her husband, trusted his judgment, and/or wanted his approval.
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The narrator dislikes the princesses she draws, who look as though they never use the bathroom. She can’t imagine the Quebecois villagers she grew up with telling princess fairy tales, but she doesn’t know what they did talk about. She and her brother were isolated from the other children. She had to beg her father to be allowed to go to Sunday school. He refused until he felt she was old enough that “reason would defend” her against Christianity. When she declared an intention to convert to Catholicism, her brother told her that Catholics believed you’d transform into a wolf if you didn’t attend mass. The narrator thinks Quebec Folk Tales should have a werewolf story in it.
The narrator dislikes her own art for reinforcing an impossible feminine ideal according to which beautiful princesses don’t need to excrete waste. Her childhood memories reveal that her father tried to avoid exposing her to religion until she had enough “reason” to “defend” herself against it—in other words, her father thought of religion as fundamentally irrational and thus dangerous.
Themes
The narrator begins daydreaming about Joe’s body hair. She likes Joe’s body but not his personality or his art—pots that he slashes or deforms. Joe’s ceramics students, mostly girls who want to make useful things, don’t like them either. Since the pots can’t hold flowers—the water escapes through the slashes—the narrator thinks their only purpose is to “uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness.” She wonders whether she likes the “purity” of his failure in addition to his body.
Implicitly, Joe’s useless pots propose a binary according to which “real” art is not useful or commercially successful the way the narrator’s illustrations are useful (for helping children understand and enjoy fairy tales) and monetizable. In other words, according to the narrator, Joe thinks of himself as a serious, noncommercial male artist and of the narrator as a frivolous, commercial female “illustrator.”
Themes
Anna reenters the cabin and asks what the narrator’s father was doing there. Unsure how to answer—Anna is the sort of person who prefers to define herself in terms of “Being” rather than jobs—the narrator says he was living. After Anna goes into her bedroom, the narrator finds herself furious with her father for disappearing. However, she always found her father’s desire to live at the remote cabin “logical,” as he found people and their violence—exemplified by Hitler—“irrational.”
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the dictator of Nazi Germany. Under his leadership, Nazi Germany committed genocide against the Jewish population of Europe during the Holocaust (1941–1945). The narrator’s father blamed Nazi violence on human irrationality, though elsewhere the novel implies that rationality—with its tendency to create binaries—may itself foment violence.
Themes
The narrator, having abruptly decided that her father is dead, decides that she can now look through the papers on the shelf. She finds numbered, labeled drawings of body parts and antlered people. Hearing David and Joe come in, she shoves the papers back on the shelf: she has realized that her father might have gone insane rather than dying.
The narrator’s father’s art subverts the human/animal binary by representing human/animal hybrids. The narrator, seeing his drawings, immediately assumes he may have gone insane.
Themes
After dinner, David wants to go fishing, so the narrator digs up some worms in the garden and catches a frog in a jam jar. She, David, Joe, and Anna pile into a canoe and paddle into the lake. David loses multiple worms without catching any fish. Eventually, the narrator hooks the frog onto his fishing line as bait. David hooks a fish and jerks it into the canoe. The narrator has to bludgeon it to death with a knife handle. Everyone reacts joyously, like World War II has just ended. The narrator feels guilty for having killed the fish but tells herself this is “irrational”: it’s okay to kill some things, like “food and enemies.”
The humorous yet disturbing comparison between humans killing a defenseless fish and Canadians helping to win World War II suggests that binaries like human/animal and ally/enemy tend to become blurred and confused, so that people end up associating animals or food with enemies (and vice versa). Meanwhile, the narrator’s claim that it's “irrational” to feel guilty about killing “food and enemies” hints that rationality is more about bolstering widely held social views than it is about objective moral truth.
Themes
David keeps fishing. A motorboat flying an American flag comes by and stops. When the Americans—guided by Claude from the motel—ask whether David has caught anything, the narrator says no and suggests that they leave, though she “used to” believe that Americans were “harmless.” As they canoe home, the narrator feels better knowing that tomorrow they’ll leave her father to his insanity on the island: “madness is private, I respect that.”
When the narrator thinks that she “used to” believe Americans were “harmless,” her change in opinion gestures toward a larger change in Canadian opinion from viewing Americans as allies during World War II to viewing them as dangerous bullies during the Cold War. Meanwhile, the narrator’s claim that insanity is “private” implies that, by contrast, sanity is social—that being sane is about being able to conform to widely held “logics” rather than about objective truth.
Themes
The next morning, Joe and the narrator have sex. Afterward, the narrator goes to the lake to clean and fillet the fish. While she works, David comes down and announces that he wants to film the fish for Random Samples. David and Joe film its guts, and the narrator fries the fillets. After they eat, while the narrator is packing in her room, she overhears David in the living room saying that he’d like to stay and fish more. Though Anna protests, he browbeats her into it. The narrator exits the bedroom and tells the others they’ll have to pay Evans when he comes regardless. David, “triumphant,” says that’s fine.
Though the items included in Random Samples are—as the title suggests—supposed to be random, David seems interested in memorializing his supposed victory over the fish, showing how art can reinforce hierarchies like the human/animal binary. His “triumphant” bullying of Anna and the others into staying at the cabin shows how one pernicious power hierarchy, human/animal, can bleed into another, male/female.
Themes
When Evans arrives, David and Joe go settle things while the narrator hides in the outhouse. She never hid in city bathrooms—she disliked their coldness and whiteness—but as a child she did hide at birthday parties, which she hated. Her family moved every year, so she was always a new kid. The other children bullied her, as she was weird and solitary. She quit Sunday School after she prayed for something, didn’t get it, and decided the church “had the wrong God.”
The narrator decided Christianity “had the wrong God” because God didn’t give her what she prayed for, suggesting that the narrator views gods’ relationship to humans as something like parents’ relationship to children—the more powerful party (gods or parents) are supposed to tend to the needy cries of the less powerful party (humans or infants).
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The narrator feels disoriented, as though she has misremembered her past or her present. To ground herself, she stares at her palm and repeats her own name. Then David knocks; when she tells him to give her a second, he says “Snappy with the crap” and laughs in imitation of Woody Woodpecker.
The narrator’s sudden, extreme disorientation in this moment may imply unreliability or mental instability. Woody Woodpecker is a cartoon character, an anthropomorphic bird; the allusion to Woody Woodpecker here may serve as another example of how art can either trouble the human/animal binary by blurring the boundaries between humans and animals or reinforce the binary by suggesting that animals are only worthwhile if they are human-like.
Themes
The narrator goes for a swim from the dock where her brother almost drowned. Once she asked her mother where her brother would have gone if he had drowned—the graveyard? Her mother told her no one knew. The narrator is sure her father, who didn’t believe in an afterlife, would have said yes. She’s curious whether he still believes that you die permanently at death.
When the narrator wonders whether her father, formerly a rationalist atheist, still believes that people die permanently at death, she is implicitly questioning whether his possible “insanity” has changed his attitude toward life, death, and the afterlife.
Themes
