and then (with the always satisfying visceral, gritty Atwood detail; also, read it aloud and hear the SOUND of the words--another element of the poetry):

The narrator is glad the others are with her because if she were alone the vacancy and the loneliness would overtake her. David starts to talk about the dead animals this country was built on and Anna chastises him for lecturing and tells him they aren’t his students. She strokes his face lovingly and the narrator wonders what their secret is. They have been married nine years and the narrator remembers how when she got married her husband changed and started expecting things from her. Our unnamed female narrator brings her lover and their two (married) friends to her childhood lakeside cabin in the woods for a brief getaway from life and for the two men to capture some footage for the amateur film they are producing. She hides her true intentions of returning to this familiar lake however. She is trying to find her father. Long missing, our narrator does not presume him dead but instead believes that he is still alive and living by the lake. The whole novel is essentially our narrator's internal monologue throughout this strange week by the lake. With her on this odyssey are three companions. Unlike the protagonist, they have names: Anna, David, and Joe. Anna is ostensibly the woman’s best friend, but Anna is an acquaintance of only two months. Joe, the narrator’s current lover, has never aroused her with his embraces. Little of her life seems authentic. During their wilderness tramping, the companions come upon a dead heron, obscenely strung up in a tree, insulted even in death. The woman is sure that insensitive American hunters are responsible for this grotesque crucifixion. She sees her own vulnerability reflected in that of the humiliated animal.

Summary

The narrator’s ex-lover. The fake husband is eventually revealed to be the narrator’s art professor, a married man with whom she had an affair. He forced the narrator into having an abortion. He is emotionally callous in nature and tries to avoid letting his affair with the narrator influence his actions. Bill Malmstrom But, Surfacing was only her second novel and it's no surprise that she has led a long literary career after such a book as this. Atwood digs deep into the female psyche, as well as the human psyche, probing and poking in all the dark underwater caves that the modern world has separated us from. Her unnamed protagonist is searching for her missing father in a remote area of northeast Canada. She has brought along her current lover and a married couple whom, removed from their city life in Toronto, she is able to see clearly and critically, and bit by bit she comes to measure how far removed she has become from the more conscious life of her childhood. Her complicated relationship with her home, a remote outpost at a lake in Quebec, becomes clear as the group drives in. She notes paradoxically that it is her “home ground, foreign territory” (7) and “Nothing is the same anymore, I don’t know the way anymore” (8). The changes wrought in her childhood home are profoundly disturbing to her, but it was her choice to stay away. Writing about the novel’s use of the heroic journey archetype, Josie P. Campbell writes that the narrator is “an unlikely hero, or at best reluctant, almost preferring not to find [her father], having dissociated herself from her family because of an event in her life which she cannot share with them, indeed cannot face herself. Her separation from her family is further emphasized by her guilt over her mother, who had died earlier of a brain tumor. The narrator could not bear to attend the funeral, perhaps her way of not accepting her mother's death and her guilt for not allowing her mother to die in nature…”

While searching through her father’s belongings for clues of his whereabouts, the narrator comes across a map with marked locations where her father was planning on carrying out research on Indian wall paintings. The whole group goes on a camping trip to see the paintings, and as they set off, they find a dead heron hanging from a tree; David decides he has to film it because he is making a film called Random Samples. The heron has a haunting effect on the narrator, who cannot stop thinking about it. So, if you happen to know the general plot of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, you can understand, with confidence, that I have very little in common with the Unnamed Protagonist. We both might have had unusual parents, but the commonalities stop there. Unnamed Protagonist is a woodsy gal, not necessarily by choice, but by a plan of her father's making. She and her brother were raised by their bizarre parents on a remote island surrounded by a remote village somewhere in a remote and very Catholic corner of Quebec. He is the son of the owner of the village motel and bar. In addition to helping his father run the bar, he works as a fishing guide. Malmstrom A stern man who disappears, forcing the narrator to search for him on his island. The narrator’s father is an atheist and a fan of the eighteenth-century rationalists. Self-reliant and rugged, he built the cabin on his own and had used the island as respite from city life. He dies accidentally on a trip researching local Indian wall paintings. The Narrator’s BrotherThey stay in her father's very rustic cabin while she searches for him. And tensions mount. There is a constricting malevolence present; there are eyes that seem to be watching, a predatory atmosphere. What should be an idyllic week of camping in the woods, is ... not. Though this book definitely has environmental themes, it isn't described in Wordsworthian swoon-inducing curlicues. In fact, what with the leeches, the rotting bird carcass, the entrails, et al, nature isn't something to mess with. A woman travels in the company of friends to a remote island to find out what happened to her father, who suddenly disappeared without a trace. Underneath the surface, stored memories of things past begin to move - upward, outward - until they burst like bubbles when they are surfacing.

Anna often feels victimized by David, who is condescending and bullying towards her, and they have both had extramarital affairs. She must adhere to David’s rules, such as always wearing makeup and having him treat her like an idiot or a child. Yet despite all this, Anna still takes David’s side throughout the story and cannot fathom actually leaving him. She in turn is condescending toward the narrator during their trip, tarnishing their friendship. David The main characters in Surfacing are the unnamed narrator, her boyfriend, Joe, and their friends, David and Anna. The Unnamed Narrator Paul’s wife. Madame is a French woman living in the village close to the narrator’s father’s island. Simple and polite, she speaks only French. Because they only speak English, the narrator and the narrator’s mother both experience long, awkward conversations with Madame. The Town Priest And in case this sounds idyllic to any of you compost-your-own-waste types, it's not. It's agony. As far as this reader can tell, Mom was a distant/aloof type and Dad was occasionally cool but waaay out there in his thinking. Neither parent supported the natural social growth or adolescent curiosity of their offspring, and when the kids went to school in the city during the winters, they suffered as the subjects of a cruel scrutiny and social disdain.

Success!

The prot’s father has disappeared and that is why they go to the remote cabin. They think he had gone feral . The situation could be like Man Thing, which is a manga I have read, but it is not, as the Prot’s father does not became a Man Thing. I was thinking that if the father did become a Man Thing he would be waiting in the woods and catch them and rip them up to make more Man Things, but this does not happen.