70 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodThe Blind Assassin
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Books 1–2 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1 Summary
The novel begins with Iris Chase reflecting on the car crash that killed her sister: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge" (1). The policeman who inform Iris of the death also note that the eyewitnesses to the crash claimed that Laura had turned the wheel "deliberately…with no more fuss than stepping off a curb," making the apparent accident a suicide (1). Iris herself strongly suspected that this was in fact the case, but lied to the police.
Privately, Iris wonders whether Laura, in the moments before her death, was thinking of the "stack of cheap school exercise books…in the bureau drawer" that Iris found later that same day (2). While reading the notebooks, Iris says she thought of Reenie—her old nursemaid—tending to her and Laura's childhood injuries: "Tell me where it hurts, she'd say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where" (2). According to Iris, however, "some people…can't ever stop howling" (2).
Next, we see a newspaper article dated from May 26, 1945, reporting that an inquest ruled Laura Chase's death an accident. It also informs us that Iris is the "wife of the prominent manufacturer" Richard Griffen, before concluding that the accident should prompt the Toronto government to address neglected city infrastructure (3).
Finally, we see the prologue to the novel-within-a-novel, The Blind Assassin. It centers on a photograph, which the unnamed female protagonist has kept as a memento of a past lover. The photo depicts the couple at a picnic: the woman is smiling at the man, who is holding a hand in front of his face. There is also a hand at the photo's edge, "cut by the margin, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass as if discarded" (5). The woman is in the habit of examining this photograph whenever she's alone, "as if she's peering into a well or pool—searching beyond her own reflection for something else, something she must have dropped or lost, out of reach but still visible, shimmering like a jewel on sand" (5).
Book 2 Summary
The story continues to cut back and forth between newspaper clippings and the novel-within-a-novel. The latter opens with a conversation between the protagonists, who are sitting outside at a picnic. The man is tossing out possible settings for a story, and together the couple settles on a science-fiction story set in a desert, complete with "a pack of nude women who've been dead for three thousand years" (9). The pair meets several more times (first in public settings, later underneath a bridge) but these encounters are subject to the woman's schedule; in order to see the man, she has to fabricate reasons to leave her house, or sneak out while the people she lives with are "out somewhere…making money" (25). Nevertheless,the couple has slept together by the time BookTwo ends, although the man warns the woman against getting too attached.
Over the course of these meetings, the man continues to expand on the narrative he began at the picnic. This story-within-a-story-within-a-story is set in another dimension, on a planet called Zycron, which is now home only to nomadic peoples. A pile of ruins, however, still exists on the site of an ancient city called Sakiel-Norn ("The Pearl of Destiny"), which was once a beautiful and wealthy civilization. However, theopulent lives led by its aristocratsdepended on the labor of serfs and slaves—in particular, the young children who wove Sakiel-Norn's famous carpets. The intricate work caused these slaves to lose their sight, after which they worked as prostitutes or, occasionally, assassins. Other children, meanwhile, were raised as sacrifices to the city's "carnivorous" gods, with priests cutting out the tongues of these Temple maidens to prevent them from screaming during the ceremony(27).The unnamed woman interrupts at this point, saying the man "just love[s] the idea of killing off those poor girls in their bridal veils" (29).
The newspaper clippings, meanwhile, recount a series of deaths in Iris's family. The first, dated from 1947, states that Richard Griffen died of a cerebral hemorrhage while aboard his boat, the Water Nixie, at his summer house. The second, dated from 1975, explains that Iris and Richard's daughter, Aimee, broke her neck in a fall following "a lengthy struggle with drug and alcohol addiction"; it also notes that Richard's sister, Winifred Prior, took custody of Aimee's daughter, Sabrina, following the accident (19). A 1998 obituary confirms that Winifred herself died in 1998, age 92, but that Sabrina is still alive and "travelling in India" (24). Finally, another 1998 clipping explains that Winifred's will has left a legacy to a Port Ticonderoga high school to create a "Laura Chase Memorial Prize in Creative Writing" (31).
Books 1–2 Analysis
The most immediately striking feature of Atwood's The Blind Assassin is probably its structure. There are three or four distinct narrative strands in the novel, all embedded within one another in various ways: Iris recounting her life in the present day, as she writes her family history; the family history itself; the love affair in the novel-within-a-novel; and the story the unnamed man in this novel tells to his lover. Meanwhile, a series of documents—primarily newspaper clippings—provides an outsider's perspective on the events Iris is describing: typically, these excerpts appear in the section of the novel that precedes Iris's firsthand account of what happened.
In the first two books, Atwood introduces us to all of these storylines, and the effect may be disorienting. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that the novel's complex structure serves multiple symbolic and thematic purposes. Most obviously, perhaps, both the novel-within-a-novel and the story within that novel parallel the Chase sisters' experiences and relationships: Iris's Blind Assassin is a fictionalized account of her affair with Alex Thomas, while the story of the mute sacrificial girl echoes the exploitation both Iris and Laura fall prey to.
Digging deeper, however, we can also find clear links between the novel's structure and many of its themes. The juxtaposition of different narratives, for instance, raises questions about the nature of truth and the difficulty of accessing other people's inner worlds; The Blind Assassin, which seems at first to offer a window into Laura's mind, turns out to simply be a variation on Iris's perspective. Meanwhile, the newspaper articles that provide an ostensibly objective commentary on the novel's events turn out to be grossly misinformed. The structure also underscores themes related to fate and the circularity of history, since motifs, phrases, and images that crop up in one narrative thread tend to recur later, in another.
With that in mind, two of the most important motifs in Atwood's novel appear for the first time in this section: blindness and muteness. The fact that the blinded children of Sakiel-Norn often go on to become assassins might seem implausible, but works metaphorically in the broader context of the novel, where characters repeatedly act in ways that are unknowingly (i.e. blindly) destructive. Muteness, meanwhile, first appears in Iris's claim that "some people can't tell where it hurts…[t]hey can't ever stop howling" (2). As we will see later in the novel, societal pressures like sexism and class structure often conspire to silence their victims. Iris's comment, however, suggests that pain alone can render a person unable to speak, perhaps because no words can capture the reality of the experience. Since The Blind Assassin is, in many ways, an account of the Chase sisters' suffering, this raises questions about the purpose of Iris's narratives; for instance, whether they areexplanations, or simply "howls" of pain. In fact, Iris will eventually hint that these two things are synonymous, claiming that a "memorial [is]…a commemoration of wounds endured" (508).
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By Margaret Atwood
