Surfacing does not represent logic and insanity as opposites—instead, Surfacing suggests that logical systems are human constructs that have internal consistency but no objective truth. For example, the narrator describes how in childhood, her brother decided that leeches with dots were good while mottled leeches were evil; he would leave “good” leeches alone but burn “bad” leeches to death—actions consistent with his internal logic but not corresponding to any objective truth. Surfacing then proposes that insanity occurs when someone can’t adhere to a socially accepted logic system. The narrative illustrates this dynamic through the narrator’s reaction to her abortion. She is caught between two opposing logical systems that claim to explain abortion’s morality (or lack thereof). According to the village where the narrator grew up, fetuses are human beings, so abortion is evil. By contrast, according to the narrator’s married lover (whom she calls her “husband”), fetuses are not human beings, so abortions are morally neutral or good. The narrator can’t force herself to adhere to either “logical,” internally consistent position on abortion: she doesn’t necessarily believe that fetuses are human beings, but she also feels very conflicted about whether her abortion was moral. Her distress at her own inability to adhere to either logical system leads her to repress her memories of her abortion and invent false memories according to which she abandoned her husband and child during a divorce. She is not fully able to face the truth until she goes “insane” and lives as an animal for five days—that is, until she rejects human logical systems entirely and lives according to an “inhuman” logic that allows her to grieve her aborted fetus without claiming that it was a human being. Thus, Surfacing illustrates both the constructed, contingent nature of logic and the possible internal logic of insanity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Logic and Insanity ThemeTracker
Logic and Insanity Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
Below me in the water there’s a leech, the good kind with red dots on the back, undulating along like a streamer held at one end and shaken. The bad kind is mottled gray and yellow. It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.
I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French were the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled.
The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate […] if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death.
If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe that you are the God, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die?
Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill.
Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.
He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that was no different; it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer.
From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.
I willed it, I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.
