Framing of Identity and Personal History through Multiperspective Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

Dev Mayurakshi

doi:10.31178/ubr.10.1.2

Abstract

: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling. The novel is dominated by the character and voice of Iris Chase, an octogenarian who slowly and fumblingly presents to the reader the fragmented and complex personal history of her family. The novel becomes an exercise in historiography through Iris’s visitations to her and her sister Laura’s youth in order to explain their tenuous relationship which is achieved through three parallel sources: Iris’s own attempts at a memoir, journalistic documents and letters from the past, and excerpts from an infamous novel published forty years previously. My paper will explore the three narrative structures present in the novel, and attempt to understand the questions of authorship and writing, and their importance in building a historiographic narrative. It will try to examine the ways in which retrospective interventions into public history helps to counter and create identities which were hitherto repressed under social decorum. This paper will borrow from Linda Hutcheon’s writings of the postmodern metanarratives in order to compose a lucid understanding of what alternative historiography in literature can achieve, keeping at the centre Atwood’s novel.

Highlights

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling
The novel is at once the memoir of Iris Chase, a reading of Laura Chase’s infamous novel, and a collage of journalistic documents and letters from forty years ago
Personal history is featured as an invaluable source of historiographic material in the novel: Atwood interweaves social history with revelations about the life of Iris and her family and gives the readers an insight into the ways people respond to socio-political shifts in communities

Summary

Introduction

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling. By juxtaposing records from traditional sources of history (several important details in the plot are exposed to the readers through excerpts from newspapers) against Iris’s memoir Margaret Atwood destabilises the authority of public knowledge around the socially prominent figures of the Chase and the Griffins. This paper will attempt to read the novel as an exercise in alternative, personal historiography which destabilises traditional accounts of record keeping and history writing.

Results

Conclusion