The Blind Assassin Themes

The Blind Assassin contains several stories embedded within one another. The main narrative, which is told from the perspective of Iris Chase Griffen, also contains excerpts from a novel supposedly written by Iris’s dead sister, Laura (although it is eventually revealed that the novel was actually written by Iris). This novel, like Atwood’s book, is called The Blind Assassin. There are then references to yet another narrative within Iris’s novel The Blind Assassin…

Although The Blind Assassin combines elements of science fiction, crime novel, and murder mystery, the book could be read primarily as a love story. Like most literary love stories, it does not describe an easy, happy, and secure union between two people, but rather illuminates the ways in which love is doomed and thwarted by issues such as conservative social norms, sexism, marital infidelity, and separation due to war and death. The main couple whose…

The Blind Assassin could be classified a crime or mystery novel: it opens with a series of deaths, the central one of which—Laura’s—is shrouded in mystery. As in a typical crime novel, the truth about Laura’s fate is slowly revealed with several unexpected twists. However, while the book does conclude with a sense of clarity about what happened to Laura and why, it deviates from the conventions of a crime novel by not…

Due to the structure of having multiple stories nested within the main narrative, The Blind Assassin is filled with emulation and the repetition of identity. Two of the central characters in the main narrative, Iris Chase Griffen and Alex Thomas, have fictional equivalents (the unnamed man and woman) in Iris’s novel, The Blind Assassin, creating a sense of repeated identity. Furthermore, by pretending that it was her sister Laura who wrote The…