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 goes to bed. When Joe comes in, she smells Anna on him. She leads him by the hand out of the cabin. Outside, she lies down and pulls him on top of her. He says he loves her. She thinks about her dead fetus forgiving her and the new child she will have, a furry “god” she will never teach language. She resolves that no one must know when she’s pregnant or they’ll force her to abort her pregnancy. Joe tells the narrator that sex with Anna didn’t matter to him—Anna was the one who wanted to do it. Then, indirectly, he asks again whether the narrator loves him. She feels unable to answer because she “can’t give redemption, even as a lie.”
The narrator’s paranoia that people would conspire to abort her pregnancy if they knew about it shows her deteriorating sanity, while her presumption that her child would be an animalistic “god” emphasizes the pagan religious element to her internally consistent insanity. Her refusal to give Joe “redemption,” likewise, shows the pagan rather than Christian nature of her new religiosity, redemption being central to Christianity but not nature-worshipping religions.
Themes
When the narrator wakes up in bed the next morning, she finds Joe looking at her happily. She concludes that he believes he has “won,” taming her with sex. When she goes into the living room, Anna is making breakfast. Anna says warmly that she decided to cook so that the narrator and Joe could sleep. The narrator concludes that Anna believes she saved the narrator and Joe’s relationship by having sex with Joe. She generalizes that men think they can “sav[e] the world” with violence and women think they can do it with sex.
Joe and Anna both think of sex as a weapon in a “battle” between men and women in love, whereas the narrator now thinks of it as a means to procreate. As such, Joe thinks he has “won” the narrator by having sex with her, and Anna believes she helped Joe “win” by stimulating the narrator’s jealousy—but in fact the narrator has entirely different concerns in mind.
Themes
After breakfast, the narrator, Joe, David, and Anna carry their bags to the dock. David and Joe chat about their film. Anna suggests that they film the narrator, as they never “got” her they way they did Anna: perhaps Anna could film David and Joe having sex with the narrator. David, Joe, and Anna laugh. Then David and Joe go put one canoe back in the shed while Anna redoes her makeup. Inwardly, the narrator compares to made-up Anna to a princess in a tower not allowed to “eat or shit or cry or give birth.”
Anna’s rather alarming joke about David and Joe both having sex with the narrator on film for Random Samples emphasizes that Random Samples, as an artwork, reinforces existing binaries and power hierarchies like the male/female hierarchical binary. Meanwhile, the narrator thinks of Anna’s makeup in a similar way, as an oppressive form of art that denies Anna’s female physicality, pretending she’s an ideal creature that doesn’t “eat or shit or cry or give birth.”
Themes
The narrator reaches into the bag containing the camera equipment, takes out the film, and dumps it in the lake. Anna warns her that Joe and David “will kill” her but does nothing to stop her. When the narrator has destroyed the film of naked Anna, she checks to see whether Anna’s “release” has helped her, but Anna just warns her again that the men will “get” her. When the narrator sees David and Joe coming back for the second canoe, she puts it into the lake and climbs aboard. As she paddles away, she hears Anna tell them that the narrator destroyed the film. David, swearing, ask why Anna didn’t stop her.
Here, the narrator strikes back against the “male” term in the male/female binary by destroying David’s masculinist, misogynistic “artwork” that involved coercing Anna to strip naked against her will. Unfortunately, Anna seems not to understand that the narrator is trying to help her—though she does try to warn the narrator that the men will retaliate for the film’s destruction.
Themes
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From the canoe, the narrator glances back at the dock. David is trying to scoop the film out of the water while Anna stands nearby doing nothing. Meanwhile, Joe runs along the shore yelling at the narrator. She paddles out of sight and lies down in the canoe’s bottom. She hears a boat motor and deduces it’s Evans. She takes her canoe to shore and creeps around to watch from the trees and make sure the others leave. Joe and Anna shout her name, and Joe looks for her in the cabin, but then they all board Evans’s boat. The narrator thinks that they are “all Americans now” like Evans. Once they’re gone, the narrator thinks that “there are no longer any rational points of view.”
The narrator inverts society’s ordinary value system, valuing animals more than humans and femininity more than masculinity. Furthermore, she associates Americanness with violent humanity and masculinity—and has decided that all the people she knows are irretrievably on the side of the Americans. Hence, she flees her friends. Once they are gone, she no longer has to deal with the supposed “rational points of view” that they represent.
Themes
When the narrator returns to the cabin, she finds it locked and concludes that Joe did it to spite her. She uses a rock to smash one of the cabin windows and climbs carefully through the hole. Unsure what to do, she falls asleep. When she wakes again, it’s evening. She climbs back out of the window, enters the garden, and pulls up vegetables. Then she cries, thinking that her parents chose to die and leave her, and she yells, “I’m here!” Nothing happens, but she thinks that if she prays, she can make her parents stop “hiding.”
As a result of her mental breakdown, the narrator has regressed to a childlike state in which she believes her parents are immortal and divine. As such, she refuses to believe that they are dead—which means they must be “hiding” from her and must be coaxed into visibility through prayer.
Themes
After the narrator eats dinner, she walks to the outhouse and then panics, thinking that the divine power she felt has vanished. She flees back to the cabin and decides to go to sleep. She wakes up in the middle of the night and goes rigid with terror: She believes that “they” are outside waiting to be let in, but she’s no longer sure what they’ll be like: “I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.” She listens, unmoving.
When the narrator compares logic to a “wall” and claims that “terror” lurks on the other side of that wall, she is implicitly arguing that logical systems don’t correspond to an inhuman external reality. Instead, she suggests that human beings construct logical systems in the same way that they build walls—to protect themselves and soothe their fears. At the same time, the narrator acknowledges that she is acting according to her own internal “logic” even in her anti-human, anti-male, anti-social mental state.
Themes
The next morning, the narrator tries to brush her hair while looking in the mirror. She feels a surge of power and realizes that the hair-brush and mirror are “forbidden.” She turns the mirror to the wall and thinks that she should have smashed Anna’s makeup compact instead of the camera to free Anna. The narrator senses that “they” forbid some places and allow others; she wishes she had let them in. Then, intuiting that they want a sacrifice, she burns the text of Quebec Folk Tales, the drawings she made for it, and her art supplies. She puts the gold ring her “husband” gave her into the fire, though she knows it won’t melt, to “purif[y]” it of blood.
The hairbrush and the mirror both represent the feminine “art” of self-idealization—hiding the realities of the female body to make it more palatable to men. As the narrator has come to reject society and its misogyny that punishes the reality of the female body, brushes, mirrors, and makeup are now forbidden to her according to her own internal logic. Similarly, the princess fairy tales represented by Quebec Folk Tales and the gold ring that represents her lies and her unwanted abortion are also now “forbidden.”
Themes
The narrator burns her scrapbooks, her childhood drawings, the map, her father’s sketches of rock paintings, and her mother’s photo album: she has to cleanse the past of “arrogant square pages.” Then she smashes the dishware, rips a page from every book, throws the cookware on the floor, and slashes each blanket and clothing item with a knife. When she’s done, she grabs one slashed blanket—she’ll “need it until the fur grows”—and walks out of the house.
When the narrator destroys all the print material in the cabin, it indicates that she now associates the written word with humanity, masculinity, and logic, which her internal logic system pits against animality, femininity, and insanity. To appease her parents in their new form as nature gods, she needs to reject everything that smacks of humanity and artificiality “until the fur grows”—that is, until she has succeeded in becoming fully animal herself.
Themes
Outside, the narrator takes off her shoes, leaves the blanket on a rock, and gets in the lake. Once she’s soaked, she strips and leaves her clothes floating in the water. She thinks that clothing is a “partial” sacrifice but the gods “want all.” The narrator realizes that she’s hungry. Sensing that canned food is forbidden, she eats fruits and vegetables from the garden. Then she creates a “lair” from leaves and branches and goes to sleep there.
By implication, clothing and canned food are both forbidden to the narrator because they represent humanity, while the narrator is trying to become an animal to placate the nature gods she believes her dead parents have become. The narrator’s rejection of clothing and canned food exemplifies how her actions have an internal logic even as, from the outside, her behavior seems insane.
Themes
The narrator wakes up around noon. Though hungry, she realizes the fenced garden is now forbidden too: “they” are excluded from everywhere “enclosed.” She goes to collect wild fruit and edible mushrooms. After she has foraged, she thinks of her baby: “the fur god with tail and horns, already forming.” She walks along the trail and feels, dizzily, that she is becoming a place for trees and animals. Suddenly, she sees her mother as a young woman, standing near the cabin and wearing the gray leather jacket. After a moment, her mother vanishes. The narrator walks to the place where her mother was standing, sees birds in the trees, and wonders which one is her mother.
The narrator’s progressive rejection of everything related to humanity—from mirrors, clothing, and canned food to even outdoor enclosures—shows the increasing logical consistency of her insanity, while her vision of her new baby as a “fur god with tail and horns” shows her rejection of humanity in the human/animal binary. Finally, her vision of her mother suggests that her religious fixation on her parents has led her to actively hallucinate.
Themes
The narrator, having gone to her lair and fallen asleep, wakes to the sound of a boat motor. She hides in the trees, from which she watches the dock. She fears that if whoever it is mistakes her for a woman, they’ll try to “take” her, whereas if they recognize what she really is they’ll kill her and hang her from a tree.
The narrator has decided that she is really and essentially an animal, not a woman. As such, she fears that human beings will try to kill her and display her body in the same way they killed and displayed the heron earlier in the novel.
Themes
Four or five men climb onto land from the boat. Two investigate the cabin. They are talking, but the narrator can no longer tell whether they’re speaking English or French. She can no longer remember what the men she knows look like either: she speculates that the intruders may be Joe, David, Claude, Paul, or Evans—in any case, they are humans and Americans. Thinking they may kill her, she runs away and hears them chasing her. Eventually, she hears a boat motor. She hides near the shore, sees the boat departing, and makes sure to count that five people are on it.
The narrator’s inability to differentiate between languages or recognize individual human men shows the progress of her insanity as she commits more and more to the internal logic of her insanity. Per her logic, humans, men, and Americans—in contrast with animals, women, and native Canadians—are all inherently dangerous and evil.
Themes
As the narrator approaches the cabin, she realizes that paths are forbidden and moves off-trail. Near the garden, she sees her father and realizes that “his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love.” Now he needs the cabin and everything else destroyed to make way for the forest. She says “father,” but when the figure turns, it’s not him. The figure looks at her with lupine yellow eyes and, uninterested, he looks away; she realizes that it’s “what [her] father has become.”
When the narrator claims that “logic excludes love,” she may be hinting that it is the logical systems and cultural meanings built up around the male/female binary that turn love, sex, and marriage into weapons rather than positive phenomena in heterosexual relationships. Meanwhile, her vision of her dead father’s wolf-like god persona points to both the progression of her insanity and her realization that her parents are no longer alive in their original forms.
Themes
A fish jumps out of the lake and hovers in the air as an “icon” like the rock paintings. The narrator realizes that her father has transformed into a fish to “return[] to the water.” After a long time, the fish transforms back into a regular fish. The narrator walks to the fence, sees footprints in the mud, and tells herself “it was true” before realizing the footprints are hers.
In art, the word “icon” refers to a visual representation of a god or other holy figure. When the narrator sees her father become an “icon” and “return[] to the water,” she is subconsciously realizing that she herself created this vision of her father as a god—and that her father really was in “the water,” i.e. drowned. Similarly, her realization that the footprints belong to her, not her father, shows her emerging from her temporary insanity in the aftermath of her breakdown.
Themes
That night, the narrator dreams of her parents canoeing away. When she wakes in the morning, she realizes that they have returned to nature and that nothing is forbidden anymore. Feeling that she must choose to live for her parents’ sake, she climbs back into the cabin and eats canned beans. She distantly remembers David, Anna, and her “husband,” and she now feels “nothing for him but sorrow”—he was just an ordinary man, and she wasn’t ready for how horrific an ordinary man could be. Her brother was the one who realized young that you had to “join in the war” or “be destroyed.”
When the narrator dreams of her dead parents as human beings, it represents her realization, as she emerges from her insanity, that they were never immortal gods but always mere mortal human beings. Her “sorrow” for the man who impregnated her and coerced her into an unwanted abortion, meanwhile, shows her newly sane acceptance of exactly what happened to her—that it was an event arising from, among other things, ordinary cultural misogyny and male/female power imbalances rather than an event with occult or religious significance. Her thought that you have to “join in the war” or “be destroyed,” meanwhile, hints that perhaps she has come to accept that relations between men and women are naturally adversarial in an unequal, misogynistic society.
Themes
The narrator realizes that she can’t survive long on the island. She ponders canoeing back to the village and then returning to the city, where she will have to survive the Americans without becoming them. She no longer believes in gods who could help; to her, they are once again a psychological and historical phenomenon. Her mother and father were just human beings. She wonders “for the first time” what their lives were like trying to raise and protect children during the war, but she realizes that she’ll never know. She turns the mirror back around, sees herself, and thinks that the real threat to her is the asylum—humans won’t recognize that she’s not insane but in a “state of nature.”
Even after returning to sanity, the narrator still thinks of “Americans” as a social category that transcends mere nationality to represent violence, misogyny, and other negative social phenomena—showing her ongoing commitment to the native/foreigner binary. Meanwhile, her recognition that her temporary “worship” of her parents was a merely psychological phenomenon suggests that religion itself is a childish psychological state that adults must outgrow, realizing that there are no gods to help them and that their parents are just fallible human beings whose lives are largely unknown to their children.
Themes
The narrator decides that she has to reject once and for all the idea that she is a victim, powerless, and incapable of harming others. She puts on some clothes, slashed but wearable. While she’s returning to her human historical moment, she retains her primitive experience and her pregnancy. She knows her fetus isn’t a god and may not even exist—it’s too early for her to know—but she resolves that “it must be born, allowed” to become “the first true human.”
When the narrator rejects the idea that she is powerless, she is to some extent rejecting the binary thinking that governed her period of insanity—the binary thinking according to which women and animals were holy and blameless while men and humans were fundamentally violent and evil. Women, too, are capable of violence and harm—as evidenced by the narrator’s “killing” of her last fetus. Her decision to give birth to “the first true human” suggests that she has reevaluated “humanity” as a concept and an identity—and decided that the problem with current humans isn’t that they aren’t animals but that they aren’t human enough. Thus, she wants to raise her child not as an animal, the way she fantasized during her insanity, but as a human and humane creature.
Themes
The narrator goes into the garden and sees Paul’s boat approaching with Paul and Joe aboard. She hides in the trees and watches. When the boat reaches the dock, Joe climbs out and calls, “Are you here?” The narrator wonders whether he’s offering her “captivity” or “a new freedom.” She realizes that she loves him but that that doesn’t change things—they still need to have a real discussion, which may cause their relationship to fall apart. Yet she recognizes that he isn’t an American; he’s still forming, which means she can “trust him.” He calls to her again, and she’s about to go to him and pauses, listening, trees all around her.
When the narrator recognizes that Joe isn’t an American merely because he is a man, she moves beyond the highly binary associative thinking that governed her internal logic during her breakdown. Yet while she is willing to give Joe the benefit of the doubt despite his masculinity, her unsurety whether he will offer her “captivity” or “freedom” shows that her new generosity toward him doesn’t solve the problem of animosity and conflict in heterosexual love, sex, and marriage in the context of a misogynistic society.
Themes
