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
In a mysterious present after the main timeline of the narrative, the narrator muses that she is “against” the neck, which she calls the “knob at the top of our bodies.” The neck makes people believe their brains and bodies are separate rather than mutually dependent: “if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.” She also muses that she isn’t sure when she had her realizations about herself or the others, though from her current perspective it seems as though she’s known forever.
When the narrator says that she is “against” the neck, she means that she is against the mind/body binary: the mind or “head” requires the body for survival and vice versa. Intellect is not more important than physicality. Yet the strange way the narrator puts this point—for example, the way she calls the neck a “knob at the top of our bodies”—suggests that she is either engaged in a poetic flight of fancy or somewhat unstable, unable to communicate her point in socially conventional terms.
Themes
Back in the narrative’s main timeline, the narrator, Joe, David, and Anna eat lunch. The narrator is feeling paranoid, as though her father might be watching them from anywhere. After lunch, she goes to feed crumbs to birds. Joe comes out, evidently wanting to talk to the narrator, when David interrupts, suggesting he cut some wood for the narrator. Joe takes an axe, and the men walk off. Because they have a weapon, which would scare her father off, the narrator doesn’t feel she needs to warn them.
The narrator’s paranoia hints at her deteriorating mental state, while her implicit supposition that her “insane” father might be dangerous indicates another binary—sane/insane. Essentially, her logic suggests that a sane person is good and safe, while an insane person—her father, in this instance—is bad and unsafe, and so it’s okay to use violence against an insane, bad, and unsafe person.
Themes
The narrator and Anna go weed the garden. The whole time, the narrator looks around for her father but doesn’t see him. Abruptly, Anna asks whether the narrator is on the pill. When the narrator says she no longer takes it, Anna says she doesn’t either: it gave her a blood clot in her leg. The narrator shares that it disturbed her vision. Anna, weeding violently, says that David wants her to go back on it, but she’s afraid the next blood clot could be somewhere worse.
“The pill” refers to oral hormonal contraceptive pills. These contraceptives increase the risk of developing blood clots. That David wants Anna to resume taking the pill despite her having developed a blood clot in her leg—which could conceivably lead to Anna’s sudden death in a severe case—further hints at his selfish, bullying tendencies and at conflict in their marriage.
Themes
The narrator thinks that people wanted “love without fear, sex without risk,” and they almost got it—but not quite. She never wants to be pregnant again: she feels they treated her like “a dead pig” at the hospital. She can’t remember why her husband wasn’t there, though he picked her up afterwards in his car.
The narrator’s claim that people want—but can’t have—“love without fear” and “sex without risk” underscores that while love, sex, and marriage can be positive experiences, they have unavoidable dark sides. Her feeling that medical personnel treated her like “a dead pig” in the hospital, meanwhile, shows how power hierarchies like male/female and human/animal bleed into one another: to be female is to be more animalistic than men and thus to be treated like an animal. Finally, the narrator’s admission that she can’t remember why her husband didn’t come to the hospital hints again that she is an unreliable narrator about various elements of her past.
Themes
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David and Joe walk up to the garden with an ineptly axed log. David wants the narrator and Anna to film him and Joe with the log, but Joe is afraid the women will damage the rented camera, so David and Joe film each other instead. Later that night, after they’ve all gone to bed, the narrator hears David and Anna having sex: Anna says “Jesus Jesus oh yes please Jesus” like she’s praying solo. The narrator compares sex to death: both are bad things to witness from the outside. She wonders whether David and Anna heard her and Joe having sex earlier, but she reminds herself that she never says any words.
Though David and Joe’s film project is supposed to be “random,” they are once again filming their own domination of nature: this time, the log they cut with an axe. Their interest in memorializing their domination of nature again shows how art can prop up existing binaries like human/animal or human/nature, while Joe’s ungrounded fear that the women will damage the camera shows how sexist assumptions that women are incompetent exclude women from certain kinds of art. When Anna seems to “pray” during sex, meanwhile, it hints that she sees David as an almost godlike figure, far more powerful than she is in their relationship.
Themes
The next day, the narrator feels trapped and stir-crazy. She wants to protect her friends from her father and her father from her friends. David fishes off the dock, Anna reads, and Joe stares at the narrator while she cleans the cabin. When she asks him what’s wrong, he claims “nothing” is. The narrator realizes that she should have broken up with him in the city: she gave him “nothing” and he, unable to deal with that, began to perceive something in it.
The narrator’s belief that she must protect her friends from her father underscores yet again that the sane/insane binary leads “sane” people to perceive the “insane” as dangerous—while her belief that she must protect her father shows her awareness that the sane/insane binary threatens people considered “insane” with coercion and violence. The narrator’s realization that Joe has begun to perceive something in the “nothing” she gave him indicates that, while Joe originally liked the narrator’s emotional detachment, he cannot ultimately handle having a female sexual partner who doesn’t give him love.
Themes
At lunch, David, Anna, and Joe wait around for the narrator to tell them what to do. Trying to think what her family used to do in childhood, she suggests that they go pick blueberries. They take two canoes and paddle to a nearby island with blueberry bushes. When they land, the narrator picks by herself near the shore. Joe approaches the narrator and abruptly suggests that they should get married. The narrator says that they already live together: a certificate wouldn’t change anything. Joe replies that that means there’s no reason not to marry. The narrator feels that he’s being “logical” and “threatening.” She tells him no.
Interestingly, the narrator describes Joe’s proposal as both “logical” and “threatening.” This description shows the narrator sees violence and danger as potentially inherent in the binaries (like sane/insane) that logic creates. Joe’s abrupt proposal again hints at his unhappiness with the narrator’s lack of emotion and commitment to him, though he initially found those qualities attractive.
Themes
Joe accuses the narrator of not caring about him. She replies that she does, but she’s already thinking about moving out of their place in the city. She thinks that men always want women to do what women don’t want to do—to give sex when they want marriage or marriage when they want sex—just to “win” somehow.
According to the narrator, marriage and sex are both ways of “win[ning]” the game of love: if a man can get a woman to give him sex or marriage when she doesn’t want to, he has won by forcing her to reveal that she loves him enough to do something distasteful to her. This jaundiced view of love, sex, and marriage shows that these phenomena can be weaponized even though people usually view them as positive.
Themes
Sadly, Joe insists that the narrator doesn’t really care about him. She finds his sadness more alarming than anger—it makes him “three-dimensional.” She tells him that she was married previously, with a baby, and it failed: she wants to protect herself from doing that a second time. Inwardly she’s thinking that some people, like her, just don’t have a knack for marriage, while other people, like Anna, do. Joe insists that his and the narrator’s marriage would be different.
When the narrator admits that Joe’s sadness makes him “three-dimensional” to her, she reveals that she usually sees him as one-dimensional, more a cartoon character than a human person. This revelation implies that in the aftermath of her first failed relationship, the narrator began to dehumanize her sexual partners as a defense mechanism.
Themes
The narrator recalls her wedding day. She and her husband got married in a post office and stepped out into a square containing a fountain with “a cherub with part of the face missing.” The husband realized that the narrator was trembling. He offered to carry her to the car, but she walked. When he told her it was “better this way,” she asked why he was “doing this to” her. When the narrator tells Joe that she’s not good enough for him, she notices his intense anger.
Earlier in the narrative, the narrator spotted a fountain with a damaged cherub in the village near the island. Now, she claims that an identically damaged fountain appeared outside the post office on her wedding day—though her earlier claim that her parents had to tell Paul about the wedding suggests that she and her husband weren’t married in the village. This peculiarly repeated detail hints that the narrator may be unreliable, misremembering her wedding day by transposing memories from other parts of her life into it. Meanwhile, when her husband says it’s “better this way” and she asks why he’s “doing this to” her, the fraught dialogue suggests either that the narrator viewed marriage highly negatively from the first or that she is somehow misremembering the context for this conversation too.
Themes
Later, the narrator sits with David, Anna, and Joe outside after eating a blueberry pie. David suggests they should move here and start a commune that does away with the “urban nuclear family”—if only they could kick out the Americans. Anna says she thinks that’s a “copout.” When David innocently asks whether she means kicking out the Americans, Anna is disgusted. The narrator gets up and bends over to pick up the dirty dishes. David makes lascivious comments about her behind to Joe. Joe, still angry, tells David that he “can have it.”
Once again, David’s hostility toward American tourists in Canada shows the importance of the native/foreigner and ally/enemy binaries to human thought in the novel. Presumably, Anna thinks that abolishing the “urban nuclear family” is a “copout,” but David baits her by pretending to misunderstand what she’s saying. His intentional misunderstanding of her point and his lewd comments about the narrator indicate that he is intentionally picking a fight with Anna, for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Joe’s angry comment that David can have “it”—referring to the narrator via her behind, as if it were a detachable part—suggests that Joe is engaging in the sexual dehumanization of the narrator as a petty revenge because she rejected his marriage proposal.
Themes
The narrator goes inside and looks for more reading material in the room David and Anna are using. On the shelf above the bed, she finds a photo album and some old scrapbooks. Sitting on the bed, the narrator flips through the scrapbooks. One contains her brother’s drawings of World War II battles and astronaut explorers. Others contain the narrator’s drawings of pretty ladies or rabbits who live inside Easter eggs and sometimes eat ice cream. When David comes in and asks why she’s on his bed, she apologizes, takes the scrapbooks, and hides them in her own room.
The narrator’s brother’s art reinforced socially approved binaries like native/foreigner and enemy/ally by depicting a morally clear-cut, real-life war, World War II. By contrast, the narrator as a child partly upheld social scripts by drawing ideally feminine women but partly subverted them by drawing anthropomorphic rabbits that disturb the human/animal binary.
Themes
Joe ignores the narrator in bed that night and at breakfast the next morning. After breakfast, the narrator takes the scraps outside. While she’s feeding the birds, Paul pulls up in his boat with some vegetables for her and a passenger, Malmstrom. Malmstrom, from Detroit, belongs to the Wildlife Protection Association of America and—on behalf of said organization—wants to buy the cabin from the narrator. He offers quite a lot of money. The narrator says that she can’t sell the property, thinking that, if her father were alive, he’d be very angry at her.
Sometimes, the Canadian characters’ paranoid suspicion and hatred of American tourists seems a product of a pernicious native/foreigner binary. Yet here, the American Malmstrom’s attempt to buy out the narrator’s family property suggests legitimate reasons for Canadian resentment of Americans’ greater (and thus potentially coercive) economic power in the post-World War II economic boom.
Themes
Malmstrom says the offer stands and gives the narrator his business card. Afterward, the narrator walks Paul to the garden, looks around for vegetables she can give him in return, and offers him a questionable lettuce. In a lowered voice, she tells him that she can’t sell the cabin because her father’s still alive—she hasn’t seen him, granted, but he left her “a note, more or less.” She can tell that Paul doesn’t believe her.
The narrator refers to her father’s bizarre sketches as “a note, more or less.” This inaccurate description and Paul’s disbelief together communicate to the reader that the narrator’s assumptions about her father’s survival may be unreliable and ungrounded.
Themes
At lunch, David asks who Paul and Malmstrom were. When the narrator explains, David suggests that Malmstrom’s story was a front: he’s a CIA agent. The Americans want a spy base for the upcoming war; when the U.S. runs out of clean water, they’ll invade Canada, and Canadian “Movement guerillas” will create a wilderness-based resistance to the invasion. The narrator, thinking about David and Joe’s lack of wilderness survival skills, asks David where he’ll get food. David claims he’s “just speculating.” The narrator remembers how, in high school, history class involved memorizing dates but never asking why people fought wars or whether they were right to do so.
David’s paranoid, nonsensical claims about how Americans will invade Canada and Canada will spontaneously produce “Movement guerillas” to resist the invasion show how binaries like native/foreigner lead to hostility, violent fantasies, and sometimes even actual violence. Meanwhile, the narrator’s musings about how history class failed to answer questions about people’s motives or moral justification for wars show that the logical systems, narratives, and academic disciplines humans invent to make sense of reality often fail to answer what the narrator suggests are the correct, important questions.
Themes
David says he hopes that narrator didn’t sell the cabin. When she says she didn’t, he says that her “heart’s in the right place. And the rest of her too.” Later, while the narrator and Anna are washing dishes, Anna asks whether the narrator thinks David is attracted to her (the narrator). The narrator, baffled, says she thought he was just “teasing.” Anna explains that David cheats on her and then tells her about it. Surprised, the narrator asks why David tells Anna afterward. Anna says he claims “jealousy is bourgeois”—but she thinks you should feel your authentic feelings. Then Anna says she just wanted to warn the narrator. The narrator is sad: she had thought David and Anna had a “good marriage.”
David’s claim that “the rest of” the narrator is in the right place, not just her heart, is a lewd joke about her body shape. The narrator assumes that he is just “teasing her,” an assumption that reveals the sexism of the narrator’s social environment—she casually brushes off arguable harassment—and her blinkered belief that David and Anna have a “good marriage.” When Anna disabuses the narrator of her assumptions, the narrator is disappointed, revealing that she wanted to believe in David and Anna’s marriage. That David justifies his adultery by claiming that “jealousy is bourgeois,” i.e. middle-class, indicates that he uses counter-cultural jargon to justify weaponizing infidelity against his wife.
Themes
After the dishes, the narrator gets out her art supplies while David, Anna, and Joe disperse. Once they’re all gone, the narrator goes to search for the deed to the cabin. She finds nothing, till she remembers that she never looked through all her father’s alarming drawings. She takes down the papers and flips through them. The drawings still seem to her a sign of insanity—until she finds a letter with a university crest thanking her father for his “photographs and tracings” and an academic article about ancient rock paintings. Abruptly, the narrator has a new theory: her father’s drawings are reproductions of ancient art, which she takes as evidence “of sanity and therefore of death.”
In the narrator’s view, creating art that subverts the human/animal binary is evidence of insanity or (in the case of ancient rock paintings) primitivity, but documenting the same art to understand it is evidence “of sanity”—and “therefore of death,” since if her father were sane and alive he would presumably have returned home or to the village by now. Thus, the narrator reinforces the sane/insane binary by supposing that any “academic,” “rational” attempt to understand insanity is a form of sane domination of the insane (or “civilized” domination of the “primitive”).
Themes
Studying the numbers on the drawings for clues, the narrator remembers how her father told her God didn’t exist. She thinks that if you say that to your children, “they will be forced to believe that you are the God”—but then human parents, unlike gods, die and stay dead. Suddenly, the narrator recognizes one of the notes on the drawing: White Birch Lake, a lake connected to the main lake in the area. She walks into David and Anna’s room to look at the local map on their wall and sees small X’s on it, including an X on White Birch Lake. She wants to go there; she can sell it to David, Joe, and Anna as a fishing trip.
When the narrator says that children raised atheists “will be forced to believe that [their parents] are the God,” she implicitly argues that religious worship of more powerful beings is an unavoidable part of human development. Thus, if discouraged from worshipping gods, children will just end up worshipping their parents instead. By implication, the narrator may “worship” her parents, an attitude that might explain her emotional revulsion at the thought of her parents changing with time, let alone dying.
Themes
Anna, sunburnt, walks in and asks the narrator what’s wrong with Joe. The narrator admits that Joe proposed marriage and she said no. Anna says that the narrator must feel terrible. To herself, the narrator thinks she doesn’t: she feels very few emotions, as if something in her neck has separated her head from her body, and now she’s trapped. Anna, in an accusatory way, suggests that the narrator should go talk to Joe.
At the beginning of this section, the narrator—from some undetermined time in the future—criticized the neck for seeming to separate the head or mind from the body. Here, she claims she suffers from just such a binary separation: her body and her mind seem to have very little to do with each other. By implication, this creates problems for her relationship with Joe because her body finds him physically attractive while her mind and emotions aren’t attracted to him.
Themes
The narrator goes out onto the dock, where Joe is lying silently, and asks whether he’s ill. When Joe says she “know[s] fucking well” what’s wrong, she suggests they return to the city and resume their old relationship. He demands to know whether she loves him. The narrator feels that “love” is too vague for her to know what it means. When she fumblingly tells Joe that she loves him “in a way,” he accuses her of hating his art and not caring about him. She denies it and asks him into the cabin, but he won’t come.
Joe’s petulant hostility, swearing at the narrator when she shows concern for him, suggests that he feels entitled to marry her—that she has somehow wronged him by not wanting marriage. Meanwhile, the narrator is uncertain of the very definition of “love,” perhaps because she has witnessed “love” harmfully weaponized in her own past relationship and in relationships like David and Anna’s. Interestingly, Joe equates the narrator not caring about him with her hating his art—which suggests that he sees her lack of admiration for his art as somehow connected to her lack of desire to marry him.
Themes
Back in the cabin, the narrator flips through the photo album she found. She sees photos of her ancestors, then her mother as a young woman, and finally of her brother and herself. Anna, putting down her book, peers at the photos and exclaims over the awful clothes they used to make girls wear. The last pages of the album contain nothing. The narrator feels that she hasn’t found anything out: it looks like she used to be whole, but at some point she was “cut in two.”
The narrator’s sense that she has been “cut in two” alludes to earlier passages in which she feels her head and body have been separated from each other. The separation of head and body represents the mind/matter binary—the narrator feels that at some point her intellect detached from her physicality, leading to feelings of loss and perhaps mental instability.
Themes
The next morning in bed, the narrator and Joe discuss which of them will move out of their place when they return to the city. When the narrator insists that she will, as all Joe’s art is there, he says bitterly, “Have it your way […] you always do.” She thinks that he conceives of love as a competition he’s trying to win against her—she’s not really the point of his love.
Earlier, the narrator thought that men want unwilling women to marry them as a way of “winning.” Here, her thoughts continue in this vein: she thinks that Joe feels she has “won”—has “had it her way,” in other words—by refusing to marry him, which to the narrator means that Joe’s desire to marry her was always about “winning,” never about a real desire for her or her love.
Themes
Later that day, the narrator, Joe, David, and Anna canoe to another island. The narrator makes tea over the fire. David raises a toast to the queen. When Anna suggests he toast the duke too, David tells her to stop: he won’t live with a feminist, as feminists are mad creatures searching in gangs for men whose testicles they can cut off. Anna jokes that she’ll join the gangs if the narrator will. When the narrator says, “I think men ought to be superior,” Anna calls her “brainwashed” and David is pleased. The narrator thinks that neither of them understood what she meant.
It isn’t entirely clear what the narrator means when she says that “men ought to be superior,” but—given that she feels neither David nor Anna has understood her point—it’s likely she means that she thinks men should be superior given their high position in the social hierarchy but actually aren’t superior. David and Anna, misunderstanding her, both seem to think that she means men should be acknowledged as superior.
Themes
The narrator thinks about how she wanted to reach out to Joe the previous night but didn’t; she recalls how, as a school child, she used to stab herself with her pens or her compass to feel anything at all. Meanwhile, Anna accuses David of misogyny, and he calls her “cute.” Then he sees a boat with an American flag sailing past and yells, “Pigs!”
The narrator’s history of self-harm hints again at her past and present mental health struggles. Meanwhile, David condescendingly calls Anna cute when she points out his sexism—thus proving her point—and shouts “Pigs” at the Americans, two incidents illustrating David’s investment in male/female and native/foreigner hierarchies.
Themes
The narrator douses the fire. Her group canoes to a portage, where they plan to carry the canoes to another lake. When David says he wants to use up his film, the narrator claims they’ll see “prehistoric” rock paintings where they’re going. David and Joe carry the canoes overland. They canoe across a second lake and come to a second portage. When the narrator climbs onto the land, she smells decay, turns, and sees something hanging from a branch by its feet with its wings outspread.
The narrator convinces David to go along with her plan by tempting him with “prehistoric” rock paintings he can film. Previously, David has filmed dead animals and cut logs, implicitly documenting man’s domination over nature; now, perhaps, he wants to document “civilization’s” domination over “primitive” art. Thus, David’s art is continually reinforcing binaries and power hierarchies.
Themes
David asks what the dead thing is. The narrator explains it’s a heron—a bird that’s inedible. David decides he wants to film the corpse, though Joe complains about the smell. As they film, the narrator wonders why the people who killed the bird displayed it. She concludes they did it as a demonstration of power, that they are Americans, and that she’ll encounter them soon—but when she comes to the end of the portage, she doesn’t see anyone.
The narrator mentions that the heron is inedible implicitly to point out that the people who killed it weren’t hunting for food—they killed the bird simply to kill it, to demonstrate their own power and reinforce the human/animal binary with violence. The narrator’s unfounded assumption that the killers must be Americans shows her own unthinking investment in the native/foreigner binary. David’s desire to film the bird’s corpse emphasizes yet again that he uses art to reinforce existing binaries and hierarchies of the kind that led to violence against the bird.
Themes
The narrator, Joe, Anna, and David have come to White Birch Lake (“Lac des Verges Blanches,” in French). They set up a camp. The narrator, digging a little latrine, recalls that she hated city toilets because they made her feel as though they could make not only her waste but her whole body disappear. Afterward, she goes to fish with David and Joe. David suggests that he might catch a “split beaver” and that they should have put that on the flag instead of the maple leaf. When the narrator is confused, David explains that “beaver” is slang for female genitalia. The narrator wonders what body part the dead heron represented “that they needed so much to kill it.”
Previously, the narrator has suggested that she feels her mind and body are unhealthily disconnected. Here, her musings on city toilets suggest that “civilization,” represented by the city, works to separate mind and body by hiding evidence of embodiment—e.g., by making human waste simply disappear. Thus, the cultural logic according to which waste and other signs of embodiment are shameful and ought to be hidden contributes to the narrator’s feelings of dissociation and instability. David’s joke about “split beaver” continues the novel’s exploration of binary thinking. It suggests that people think of women as more animalistic than men, as evidenced by referring to female genitalia as “beaver,” in a way that justifies violence against both women and animals like the heron.
Themes
The narrator remembers the men she saw tugboating on the lake when she was a child. After they left, she and her brother explored the boat and found drawings scrawled on the walls. The narrator didn’t know what the drawings represented until her brother explained they were female genitalia. The fact that they were genitals didn’t disturb the narrator, but it shocked her that they would be drawn without the rest of the body there. Now she thinks they’re like cave drawings: “you draw what you’re hunting,” and as the men had enough food, they must have longed for that.
If the narrator is correct that “you draw what you’re hunting,” it suggests that art reflects the desires of the artist: people who benefit from existing social hierarchies are likely to produce art that reinforces them. In this instance, men who gain social power from the subordination of women produce art that dehumanizes women, treating them not even as whole creatures but as disembodied genitalia.
Themes
Suddenly, David and Joe both hook fish. David reels his in, but Joe’s escapes. David asks the narrator to kill his fish, but she hands him a knife and tells him to do it himself—as they have food, she feels they have no right to kill the fish. While David and Joe look at the dead fish, the narrator frees into the lake some frogs bought along as bait. She remembers animal dissections in science class and thinks: “Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.” Joe’s fishing line is broken. As the narrator fixes it, she feels like an “accomplice.”
According to society’s prevailing logic, humans and animals are fundamentally different: humans treat animals in ways they would never treat other humans. Yet the narrator rejects this prevailing logic: she believes that humans “practice” atrocities on animals that they will later inflict on human beings. When the narrator feels like an “accomplice” for helping Joe fish, then, it suggests that she feels fishing for sport rather than food is a violent crime and is akin to murder.
Themes
Two Americans canoe up to the narrator, David, and Joe and ask whether they’ve caught any fish. The narrator, noticing a starred decal on their canoe’s bow, thinks it’s there to show that Canadians are in “occupied territory.” She reviews every ugly story she has heard about drunk, criminal, violent American tourists.
Though the narrator questions other binaries (e.g. human/animal), she remains very invested in the native/foreigner binary, reacting with paranoia to people she believes are American—though in fact it isn’t even clear whether the starred decal is an American flag.
Themes
The narrator, David, and Joe canoe back to their camp. After gutting the fish, the narrator goes to the water to wash her hands. Anna, following her, shares that she’s forgotten her makeup and she’s terrified how David will react: he has “rules,” and if she violates them, he retaliates, either by refusing sex or hurting her during sex. Anna says David would deny it all, but she appeals to the narrator to believe her. The narrator suggests Anna divorce him. Anna says that she can’t tell whether he wants her to—their relationship worked until she fell in love with him, which he can’t stand. She speculates that he longs for her death.
The novel has characterized cultural logics—e.g. the logic according to which animal life is worth less than human life—as essentially contingent, not based on objective reality. Now Anna claims that David has imposed on her his own ridiculous logical system, a set of “rules” she has to follow or receive punishment. In this abusive situation, Anna must wear makeup, artfully concealing her real appearance and adhering to an impossible feminine ideal. Interestingly, Anna suggests that David torments her because he can’t bear that she loves him, emphasizing that love—though often romanticized—can be a source of pain for both the lover and the beloved.
Themes
The narrator and Anna return to the camp, where the narrator makes a fire. David and Anna sit together, the narrator and Joe slightly apart. Anna sings. After, she and David go to their tent. Joe goes into his and the narrator’s tent, but the narrator stays out for a moment so that he’ll be asleep when she comes in. She sees the Americans’ fire across the lake and hopes something terrible happens to them. Then she goes into the tent. Joe, awake, tells the narrator that she “win[s]”: they should go back to how their relationship was before. The narrator, who has already mentally moved out of their shared apartment, refuses. Joe curses. For a moment, she thinks he’ll hit her, but he just turns away.
When the narrator hopes that something terrible happens to the people she believes to be Americans, she reveals yet again her paranoid investment in the native/foreigner binary, according to which all Americans visiting Canada are evil interlopers. When Joe tells the narrator that she “win[s],” he is showing that he views their relationship as a battle of wills rather than a cooperative endeavor. Finally, when the narrator briefly fears that Joe will hit her, her fear hints at the misogynistic violence that reinforces the male/female binary.
Themes
In the night, Joe has a nightmare, but when the narrator asks what it was about, he doesn’t tell her. The next morning, the narrator fries fish for breakfast. Anna, without makeup, keeps trying to hide her face from David, who doesn’t seem to notice her behavior. When David announces his desire to film the rock paintings, the group sets off toward the place where the narrator saw an X on her father’s map. They find a cliff, but there are no paintings. The others are disappointed, while the narrator wishes she could confront her father about deceiving her.
When Anna tries to hide her face from David, it shows her real fear of what he’ll do if she fails to artfully conceal her real appearance and adhere to an impossible feminine ideal. Yet his apparent failure to notice suggests either that she has overstated his investment in her makeup—or that he is biding his time before he retaliates. Meanwhile, the narrator’s sense that her father has “deceived” her—though he never explicitly communicated with her about the rock paintings—shows her growing paranoia.
Themes
As the group paddles back, the Americans come across them and ask where they’re from—one guesses Ohio. When the narrator, angry at being considered American, announces that her group is all Canadian, one of the “Americans” happily announces that they are too—from Sarnia and Toronto respectively. The narrator angrily asks why they have that decal on their boat, then, and the man she’s talking to explains he’s a Mets fan. Belatedly, the narrator realizes the sticker isn’t a flag—it says “GO METS” on it.
Due to the narrator’s paranoid investment in the native/foreigner binary, she became unreliable, misidentifying fellow Canadians as American interlopers. Her mistake both underscores that she is potentially unreliable on other subjects and that paranoid binary thinking leads to errors.
Themes
The narrator tells herself that if the men killed the heron, as she believes they did, they are spiritually Americans anyway—and her own group is turning into Americans too. Back at the campsite, the group packs up and begins the journey back to the cabin. When they pass the heron corpse again, the narrator feels “sickening complicity,” as if she’d seen the killing and not intervened. She thinks that, on the one hand, it’s odd of her to be more disturbed by violence against animals than news stories about violence against humans—but on the other hand, the violence against animals seems more senseless.
The narrator’s paranoid understanding of the native/foreigner binary is diverging from ordinary reality: for her, “American” no longer refers to a nationality but to a pernicious attitude, one associated with senseless violence against animals. Because “American” no longer refers to a nationality, anyone can become “American” through violence against animals or “sickening complicity” with that violence—including the narrator herself.
Themes
The narrator recalls how her brother would capture animals and put them in jars in his “laboratory.” Often the animals would die in captivity. Once, the narrator freed the survivors. Her brother was furious with her. He changed the location of his laboratory and captured more animals; though the narrator discovered the second lab, she was too afraid to free the animals again: “Because of my fear they were killed.” Her childhood drawings eschewed violence, but her brother’s war sketches were more realistic. She thinks that she and her brother were no better than her bullies in the city. They just tormented animals instead of other children.
Here the narrator suggests that another mainstream cultural logic, the logic of experimental science represented by her brother’s childhood “laboratory,” also reinforces the human/animal binary and leads to violence against animals. She feels complicit in this violence due to her frightened failure to stop it: “Because of my fear they were killed.” Moreover, she draws a direct connection between the violence she and her brother inflicted on animals and the social violence of bullying that they themselves suffered in the city: the narrator and her brother were both victims and perpetrators of violence.
Themes
The group has returned to the cabin. It’s the last day before Evans comes to pick them up. The narrator checks the map with the X’s again; she tells herself that her father must have marked White Birch Lake because he thought a rock painting might be there. The narrator is setting off alone when, from afar, she sees David, Anna, and Joe together by the dock. David is trying to bully Anna into stripping so he and Joe can film her for Random Samples, spliced in beside the heron. Joe, in a bored voice, tells David to leave Anna alone. Eventually, David threatens to throw Anna in the lake. Anna strips and cannonballs into the lake. When she climbs out, she’s crying.
Previously, David has focused on filming dead animals (the fish, the heron) and dominated nature (the axed log) for his supposedly “random” film. Now, he tries to coerce his unwilling wife to get naked so that he can put her naked body in the film next to a killed animal—a juxtaposition suggesting that dehumanization of women and violence against animals spring from similar binary, hierarchical thinking, whereby men are considered superior to women and humans superior to animals. It is possible that this dehumanization of Anna is David’s vengeance against her for forgetting her makeup earlier in the novel, though the narrator never explicitly makes this connection.
Themes
Anna walks into the cabin, and Joe leaves. David remains by the dock. When the narrator walks down to get a canoe, David asks how she’s doing. She thinks that she and David can’t love other people, whereas Joe and Anna can—but she’s not sure whether those who can’t love are the freaks or those who can. She asks David why he did what he did. David claims that Anna torments him—she has sex with other men, which he wouldn’t mind except that she lies about it. The narrator tells David that Anna loves him. He claims that’s nonsense—Anna is trying to castrate him, and anyway, she never tells him she loves him.
If David is telling the truth, then David and Anna each weaponize sexual infidelity against the other in their unhappy marriage. Moreover, David clearly thinks of their marriage as a “battle of the sexes,” somewhat in the same way Joe is always trying to determine who is “winning” in his and the narrator’s relationship. David believes that Anna is trying to emasculate him somehow, which to him proves her lack of love.
Themes
The narrator suggests that Anna and David should talk. David says Anna is too stupid for conversation. He claims that he’s for women’s equality, but Anna is “a pair of boobs” he married right out of the ministry. The narrator tells him she thinks he and Anna could reconcile. Climbing into the canoe, the narrator thinks back to what Anna said about “emotional commitments” and concludes that Anna and David have committed to loathing one another, which renders their relationship stable. David asks whether the narrator wants company. She declines.
David simultaneously claims to support feminism and calls his wife a “pair of boobs” whom he married at a vulnerable moment after leaving his religion. David’s ironic claim to support women while reducing his wife to “boobs” once again suggests a pernicious mind/body binary: women can be “equal” so long as men associate them with their minds, but once men start considering women’s bodies, the women are reduced to physical parts. In reaction to David’s outburst, the narrator reflects that mutual hatred can be the “emotional commitment” underpinning a marriage—a reflection that deromanticizes marriage.
Themes
As the narrator paddles, she sees an X of plane trails in the sky and thinks of it as an “unsacred cross.” Then she compares the heron to Christ: anything that dies as a substitution for “our” death is Christ. Yet while the body worships sacred sacrifices, the “head” refuses to.
The dead heron, hung upside-down with its wings outspread, would have made an “unsacred cross” shape like the X of plane trails. By comparing the dead heron to Christ, the narrator suggests that the Christ’s crucifixion to atone for humanity’s sins illustrates a general truth: on some level, human beings commit acts of violence to avoid facing the reality of “our” deaths through displays of power. By claiming that the body but not the head appreciates this type of violence, the narrator suggests that the logic underlying “Christlike” sacrifices violates current, secular cultural beliefs but is nevertheless viscerally appealing to people.
Themes
The narrator reaches a cliff and dives from the canoe, searching for a rock painting she believes the lake has risen over. On her first dive, she finds nothing. On her second, right as she decides to resurface for air, she thinks she sees something. On her third, she sees nothing on the rock but “a dark oval trailing limbs” in the water beneath her. Panicked, she swims to the surface; as she does, she sees two canoes above her but isn’t sure whether she’s just seeing double.
The description of “a dark oval trailing limbs” suggests that perhaps the narrator has seen a drowned corpse, yet her disorientation and uncertainty about whether she’s seeing double casts doubt on her reliability—her visual perceptions might be distorted, or she might even be hallucinating.
Themes
When the narrator surfaces, there really are two canoes—Joe is in the other one. The narrator climbs back into her canoe. Joe asks what exactly she’s doing. Resting silently in her own canoe, the narrator thinks first that she saw her drowned brother’s corpse. Then she thinks that every time she thought she was remembering her brother, that was a “disguise”; she was really remembering the creature she killed, which wasn’t a baby but “could have been one.” The illegal procedure took place in a dilapidated house; the narrator was wearing her ring. She realizes that she faked other memories because she couldn’t stand the real “mutilation.”
The creature that “could have been” a baby but wasn’t refers to the narrator’s fetus, which she reveals here that she terminated in an illegal abortion. When the narrator refers to the abortion as a “mutilation,” it suggests that she did not desire the abortion but had it under duress—hinting that her previous claims about her not wanting a child while her husband did were false. Whereas previously the narrator’s ring seemed to symbolize the lies she told other characters to navigate a sexist society, it now comes to represent her unreliability as a narrator, appearing again just as readers learn that the narrator has been deceiving them as well as the characters around her.
Themes
The narrator remembers that her “husband” hadn’t gone with her to the house. He was at a birthday party with his children. He came to get her after; there was no wedding and no post office, and the narrator brought the “cherub with half a face” from the company town to have a familiar landmark. After the procedure, the narrator never went home again or told her parents what had happened; they were from an age of nuclear families and had no understanding of evil.
The narrator’s “husband” has children of his own, there was no wedding, and the story that the narrator told about the “cherub with half a face” was false—all details suggesting that the narrator’s “husband” was in fact married and had children with someone else. It isn’t clear whether, when the narrator talks about her parents not understanding “evil,” she is referring to her abortion or the implied adultery. Given that the narrator just claimed she was really thinking about her fetus every time she thought about her brother, it is possible that her memories of her brother’s violence against animals are veiled references to her own “violence” against her fetus, a life that she may consider non-human or not-yet-human but that she still feels guilty for ending. In that case, the “evil” in question would be the abortion.
Themes
In the present, Joe asks the narrator whether she’s all right. She remembers how her “husband” talked her into the procedure by telling her that “it wasn’t a person, only an animal”—but to her, that doesn’t make a difference. She feels that she should have protected the fetus but instead became just another “killer.” After the procedure, the narrator broke up with the man who impregnated her, a rejection he couldn’t understand—he felt he had been considerate in arranging it for her, as “others wouldn’t have bothered.”
This passage makes explicit the link between the narrator’s repugnance for violence against animals and the trauma that her abortion caused her. Because the narrator rejects the human/animal binary according to which human lives are more valuable than animal lives, the fetus being “an animal” rather than “a person” fails to convince her that abortion—which she characterizes as “kill[ing]” a fetus—is morally acceptable. Meanwhile, the “husband’s” claim that “others wouldn’t have bothered” to arrange an abortion shows his failure of love and care: he either fails to notice or chooses not to notice that the women he impregnated had to be seriously pressured into having the abortion in the first place.
Themes
The narrator has an epiphany. She has never gotten anything from the Christian god, but the gods “on the shore and in the water” have given her things she “needed.” She deduces that while at first her father was just hunting down rock paintings, “after the failure of logic” he must have had an epiphany that certain places were “sacred” whether or not they had paintings and marked all of them.
As the narrator consciously wrestles with her traumatic abortion for the first time in the narrative, she abruptly begins to contemplate nature gods “on the shore and in the water.” The narrator has been avowedly not religious before this point, so the narrative may be suggesting that her trauma has returned her to a “childlike” psychological state of magical and religious thinking. When she refers to her father’s “failure of logic,” she may be referring to his hypothesized insanity or simply to cognitive decline with age. At the same time, however, she may be indirectly describing the “failure of logic” in her own case: social logic told her that because fetuses weren’t human beings, abortion was morally acceptable. Perhaps the failure of this logic to persuade the narrator has led to her breakdown, triggering her own epiphany about nature’s “sacred” qualities.
Themes
Ignoring Joe, the narrator paddles back to shore, takes off her sweatshirt, and leaves it as an offering to the unknown powers. Joe follows and asks whether she’s okay. The narrator wants to tell Joe that she doesn’t love him but that he “deserve[s] to be alive.” She tries, but somehow he doesn’t seem to hear her. He urges her to lie down on the ground and is taking off their clothes when she tells him to stop. When he asks what her problem is, she tells him that it’s the right time in her cycle to get pregnant. He stops, gets back in his canoe, and flees.
The narrator wants to tell Joe that he “deserve[s] to be alive” even if she doesn’t love him in the aftermath of unearthing repressed memories about her abortion, suggesting that she found her abortion so traumatic because she values life in itself, whether human, animal, or fetal. Despite Joe’s desire to marry the narrator and his attempt to have sex with her, he is so terrified by the idea of getting her pregnant that he flees the scene when she reveals that she’s fertile. His flight emphasizes that the modern, secular concept of romance has divorced “love” from reproduction: even if Joe “loves” the narrator and wants to marry her, that doesn’t mean he’s open to having children with her.
Themes
When the narrator returns to the cabin, it’s empty. She swings on the swing and fidgets with the gold ring she wears, which her “husband” gave her to make things easier for them at motels. While he didn’t care much about her as an individual, she adored him, even though he gave her bad grades on her art assignments. He did tell her he loved her once, though, one night after she had locked herself in the bathroom crying; in the same conversation, he showed her photos of his wife and children to explain his “reasons.”
Here the narrative makes clear that the narrator and her “husband” were never married: in fact, he was her art professor, and he was married with children to someone else. Thus, the gold ring becomes a thoroughgoing symbol of unreliability and deception: though such rings are supposed to represent exclusive commitment, the “husband” gave one to the narrator solely to make their extramarital affair easier to conduct, thus entirely changing the ring’s meaning. Moreover, the “husband” being the narrator’s art professor makes the fact that he encouraged her to lower her artistic ambitions look very sinister: he took advantage of his artistic authority over her both to convince her that women can’t be great artists and to exploit her sexually.
Themes
The narrator hears “Americans” boat past and thinks that they could get hurt if they enter the sacred spaces unknowingly. She believes she was only spared due to her father’s “guides.” She decides that her mother must have left her something as well and goes to look for it. To avoid David, who is looking for Anna, the narrator ducks down the forest trail, but he follows her and puts his hand on her leg. When she rejects his sexual overtures, he tells her that Joe and Anna are having sex somewhere in the forest right now.
The narrator is still referring to people who are likely fellow Canadians as “Americans,” showing that even after her spiritual epiphany the native/foreigner binary has a hold on her mind. Earlier in the novel, the narrator suggested that children who aren’t raised religious end up worshiping their parents. Now, in her newly traumatized and spiritual mindset, she seems to be thinking of her dead parents as “guides” who have left her a mysterious spiritual inheritance. While the narrator’s mind is completely wrapped up in her epiphany, David is still focused on sexual retribution against Anna, trying to convince the narrator to have vengeful sex with him by telling her that Joe and Anna are likely cheating together.
Themes
The narrator suggests that Joe and Anna might be in love; then she asks whether David is trying to have sex with her because he loves her. David, who assumes she’s joking, suggests that she should have sex with him as revenge. The narrator thinks that David is trying to convince her to have sex for an “abstract principle,” which could almost be done with disembodied genitalia. The narrator, trying to get David to go away, tells him she’s not attracted to him. He calls her a “bitch.”
In her disoriented state, the narrator—who has claimed to find “love” a vague, difficult to define word—is genuinely willing to believe that if Joe and Anna are having sex, they might be in love. David fails to understand the narrator’s train of thought and suggests vengeance as a motive for sex. Such an “abstract principle” fails to appeal to the narrator, however. David reveals his misogyny yet again when he calls the narrator a “bitch” for refusing to have sex with him.
Themes
The narrator sees David as a collage of external influences, not an authentic person, with “American […] spreading over him.” She walks around him back toward the cabin. He follows her, apologizing and asking her not to tell Anna. The narrator thinks that if David had convinced her to have sex, he would have told Anna immediately.
“American” is coming to represent for the narrator all “foreign” influences, social hierarchies, and binary thinking. Thus, David’s overintellectualized approach to sex and his kneejerk sexism make him “American.”
Themes
Later, the narrator, David, Joe, and Anna have dinner together. When Anna is watching, David touches the narrator’s hand. Seeing Anna’s sad look, the narrator thinks that Anna fights David to keep him with her; he’d go “to continue the war” elsewhere otherwise. The narrator tells Anna that she didn’t have sex with David. Anna mockingly calls the narrator “pure” and says that Joe told her the narrator wouldn’t have sex with him anymore. David suggests that the narrator hates men. The others glare accusingly at the narrator, who think that she hates “the Americans, the human beings, men and women both.” When Anna asks whether the narrator will respond to their accusations, the narrator says no, and Anna calls her “inhuman.”
When the narrator thinks that David would go “continue the war” elsewhere if Anna didn’t keep fighting him, it implies that Anna lashes out at David primarily because she loves him and doesn’t want to lose him: he can only conceive of love and marriage as battles, so she gives him a battle rather than giving him up. The narrator tries to opt out of this combat dynamic by announcing that she didn’t have sex with David—didn’t participate in his hostilities against Anna—but the other characters all judge her for her choice, perhaps because they all share David’s view of love as an acrimonious battle. Meanwhile, all the characters endorse the human/animal binary, but whereas Anna judges the narrator negatively by calling her “inhuman,” the narrator prefers to be “inhuman” or an animal because she has decided that human beings are fundamentally violent and evil.
Themes
After dinner, the narrator and Anna clean up in silence. The narrator wonders where her mother would have left something for her. Once the clean-up is done, the narrator searches her mother’s leather jacket but finds nothing. Then she searches her room, senses an aura of power, and decides her mother’s gift must be in the scrapbooks. Suddenly, she hears boat noises. The whole group goes to see what’s going on. Outside, the narrator sees a police boat carrying two officers, Claude, and Paul. David goes to talk to them. Then he tells the narrator that they’ve found her father’s body with a camera in the lake.
The narrator’s mystical sense that her mother must have left her some heirloom or clue indicates both the narrator’s magical, unbalanced thinking and her growing “worship” of her parents. David’s claim that the police have found the narrator’s father’s drowned body suggests that the narrator may really have seen a corpse while she was diving in search of cave paintings earlier in the narrative.
Themes
The narrator believes that David has invented this story to trick her. She says that she’ll talk to Paul about the funeral when they return to the village the next day; then she goes to her room and searches through the scrapbooks for her mother’s gift. She finds a picture she drew as a child of a pregnant woman and a horned man who represented God (as a child, the narrator believed that if the devil got to have horns, God should too). She realizes that this picture, like the rock paintings, has assumed some new inhuman meaning she needs to decipher. She hears David, Anna, and Joe moving around in the living room and thinks that they find her behavior “inappropriate” in light of her father’s death—but in her mind, “nothing has died, everything is alive.”
Again, the narrator’s paranoid refusal to believe David and her sense that “everything is alive” shows that she is experiencing a mental breakdown, emotionally regressing, and developing a worshipful attitude toward her dead parents similar to a small child’s.
Themes
