Summary
Chapter 14
They all regard the dead bird, and David excitedly says he will film it. The narrator thinks how you cannot even eat a heron; it is strung up like this just because humans can do that and for no other reason. It must be the Americans.
They arrive at White Birch Lake. David wants to fish but they have to set up first. Anna decides to stay at the campsite. Out on the lake it is cool, but the narrator feels a bit woozy due to the water and sun glare. When she closes her eyes all she sees is the heron.
A memory floats into the narrator’s head of a tugboat she and her brother came across when they were children. It was abandoned but there were dirty pictures in it. It bothered her that the body parts were seemingly cut off from the bodies to which they belonged.
David catches a fish and asks the narrator to kill it. She refuses, telling him he knows how. She will not do it anymore; she had no right to, as they have their own proper food in the tents. She lets all the frogs go, slipping them back into the water.
The Americans in a silver canoe round the point, barging toward them. They ask if they’re catching anything and David says yes. The narrator knows they were the ones that killed the heron—a senseless killing, a game.
When they are back, Anna confides in the narrator that she forgot her makeup and David will kill her. She assures Anna he won’t notice but Anna replies that of course he will. She says he has all these rules for her and that if she breaks one then she gets punished, but he keeps changing them so she doesn't even know what they are. He likes to make her cry, she says, and that if anyone mentioned this to him he’d just laugh and say she was making it up. The narrator suggests she get divorced and Anna says sometimes she thinks David wants her to do that. She adds that sometimes she even thinks he wants her to die.
They walk to the fire and Anna pretends everything is normal. A barred owl calls out. In the distance is the Americans’ fire. The narrator wishes evil upon them.
She crawls into her tent with Joe. He tells her she won and they can go back to normal, but she says no. He tenses in anger and she thinks he might hit her, but he turns away. She listens to the noises outside, but none are dangerous.
Chapter 15
In the morning, the narrator steps outside the tent and dips her face into the water of the lake. She cleans the fish and they eat it for breakfast.
They decide to try and find the rock paintings, which would be in a bay near the Americans’ camp. The narrator looks at the shore and the map, knowing her father had been here. But after looking in what seems to be the right place, there is still nothing. She must have done something wrong, she thinks. Her friends are disappointed, as David wanted something for the movie.
They head back past the Americans’ camp, but when they start talking to them, the men say they are actually Canadian. The narrator is furious that they disguised themselves. It doesn't matter if they are not actually American, though; they killed the heron, and they are still Americans. The American sensibility and the people “spread themselves like a virus” (130).
David wants to stay and talk baseball with them, but the narrator hurries them away from her “own anger as well as from the friendly metal killers” (131). They pass the heron again, which smells even worse and is covered in flies. She feels a “sickening complicity” (131) and wonders why she feels more upset about this than wars or massacres. It must be because “the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted” (131).
She remembers how her brother would capture little creatures and keep them in his “laboratory” (132). When she set them free, he was enraged, and her brother would just keep the creatures somewhere else. She felt helpless.
When they pass the surveyors, she thinks of how everything is ruined, everything is bought and sold.
Chapter 16
Evans is coming tomorrow to take them back, and the narrator is trying desperately to find something to vindicate her father. She obsessively checks the map and decides to go out again. She looks for her father’s camera but cannot find it.
The others are down at the dock. Joe is holding the movie camera and David is needling Anna, who is sunbathing and reading. He says they need a naked lady for the film and that she can be famous like the dead heron. She is trying to ignore them. David will not let her alone, saying she likes her body even if she is getting fat, and that she should share its wealth and not be stingy. Anna is getting mad and Joe tells David to stop, but David tells Joe to shut up. David grabs her and holds her and threatens to throw her in the lake. She furiously agrees, and takes off her bathing suit. She sticks her middle finger out at them and does a belly flop into the lake. The narrator sees Anna emerge, crying hard, her “pink face was dissolving” (137).
Joe and Anna leave and the narrator heads down to where the canoe is. David remains, and she thinks how the two of them are like each other since they do not know how to love and there is something missing in them. She had not meant to say anything but she asks why he did that. She is not defending Anna; she only wants to understand. He looks at her and then says that she asks for it and makes him do it; she goes with other men and he does not care but wants her to do it honestly. The narrator says Anna loves him and he says she is trying to cut his balls off. He adds that he thinks she is trying to leave but he has not asked. Besides, he shrugs, he might be for women’s equality but Anna is not actually his equal— “what I married was a pair of boobs, she manipulated me into it” (139).
The narrator climbs into the canoe. She remembers Anna’s comment about emotional commitment. At least she and David are committed in their hate, which must be as absorbing as love.
David asks if she needs a paddler, but she says no.
Chapter 17
As she paddles, the narrator ruminates on the nature of Christ—anything that suffers and dies and is not them is Christ, and animals that die are substitutes for humans, and when people eat animals they are “eaters of death” (141).
Her plan is to dive, which she knows is dangerous alone but she feels compelled to do it. She does her first dive, using her fingers to move herself along the rock face and looking for something that is not there. Her body aches from the portage. She tries again, but there is still nothing. Her father would not have marked their map incorrectly, she knows, because he was always consistent and followed his own rules and axioms.
She continues to try, feeling reckless but elated. Suddenly she sees something—a dead thing, something “blurred but it had eyes, it was something I knew about” (142). She is terrified. When she emerges she sees Joe in another canoe, coming out to make sure she was okay.
She lays at the bottom of the canoe with her eyes closed. She thought the thing in the water was her drowned brother but it had never been her brother; that was a disguise. She knows what it was—it “wasn’t a child but it could have been one, I didn’t allow it” (144). For a second, she thinks she saw it afterward but then corrects herself that she did not. She remembers the procedure was not even at a hospital and there were “furtive doors and whispers, they wanted you out fast” (144). She could not accept the ruin and the mutilation so she concocted a story for herself about the ring on her finger. It was a “faked album, the memories as fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I’d lived in it until now” (145).
The man was not her husband and did not even come with her to the abortion. He was married and had his own kids and only came to pick her up. There was no wedding and no post office. She could not face her family, knowing they would never understand.
The man assured her the abortion was normal and easy and the fetus was not a person but only an animal. He could not understand why she did not want to see him anymore afterward. The death stayed with her, “layering it over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl” (146).
She thinks she figured out what her father had done: his later drawings were not copied from the rocks but were his own. They were new places and new oracles and true vision, not logic. Before leaving, she knows she has to leave some sort of offering to the place, so she leaves her sweatshirt.
Joe asks if she is okay and his touch comforts her. She wishes he could get to the place she is; she feels a rush of affection for him. He begins to caress her and pulls her down to the ground to make love, but she does not want him in her because he is “one of the killers” (148). She tells him no and he becomes angry and starts holding her down, but she tells him she will get pregnant. He stops, and gets in his canoe and paddles furiously away.
Chapter 18
No one is at the cabin when she gets back. She sits on a swing and looks at the ring on her finger. He did give it to her, saying it would be easier to get into places. She remembers motels they went to and how he propped his watch up to make sure he was not late to get back to his real family. She could have been anyone to him but he was important to her. Since he was a professor of hers, she worshiped him. He said he loved her, but warned her about his family and chastised her to be mature when she got upset.
She hears more Americans on their powerboat. She sees that they are heading off toward where she dove and where the gods live, but they will find nothing because they do not have the talisman she does. She thinks her mother must have also left her something, but it would be simpler and more final than her father’s gift.
The narrator stands and walks into the trees, thinking of her mother and how she hated the coffin, an artificial way to be dead. She thinks she should have gone and gotten her mother and brought her back here and let her go away herself as she wishes.
David interrupts her reveries. He tries to seduce her and when she resists, tells her Anna and Joe are off right now having sex. She tells him he does not turn her on and he curses at her. She feels a sense of power fill her. She can see he is an imposter and a pastiche, covered with patches of America. She is also certain she has to find what her mother left her, the thing she hid. What her father left her is not enough to protect her; it is knowledge but there are other gods, gods not just of the head.
David worriedly says he is sorry and not to tell Anna.
At dinner, there is an icy awkwardness. The narrator can see how sad David and Anna are and how Anna is also desperate, her only weapon her body. The narrator says David propositioned her but she did not acquiesce. Anna replies bitingly that Joe said she will not put out anymore, and David says she hates men or she wants to be one. She wonders if she does hate men, but decides what she really hates is the Americans.
Chapter 19
After dinner, Anna volunteers to wash dishes, as if in an apology for taking David’s side. She sings to avoid talking. The narrator is wondering about her mother’s gift to her, and decides that she would have hidden it somewhere that would have been likely for her to find. She looks all over the cabin and finds nothing until she steps into her room, upon which she immediately feels the power. It has to be the scrapbooks.
Anna calls out that there is a boat outside. It is a large police launch. David heads out to meet it along with Anna. The narrator stays inside. There are two officers, Claude, and Paul, which she finds odd.
David and Anna hurry back up and he announces breathlessly that they found her father. Some Americans found him dead in the lake with a skull fracture as if he had fallen off a cliff. His camera was around his neck, and that weight might have kept the body down longer. She thinks it is clever for David to have guessed the missing camera since she did not tell them that. Anna and David seem disappointed in her, as if she had foiled a plan of theirs.
The narrator goes back inside her room to look at the scrapbook. She fixates on an image she made of a woman with a round stomach, a baby sitting inside her looking out, and a man with horns on his head and a barbed tail. She decides the baby is herself after she was born, and the man is God, who also has attributes of the devil. These are the guides her mother saved for her, but she has to transform before she can truly look upon them without dying.
She feels like the others outside her room are already turning metal, “skins galvanizing” (160). She looks at her palm, which Anna once read, noticing the break in the lines.
Their voices murmur. She realizes they are avoiding her and think she should be filled with mourning. Yet no one has died and everything is alive and waiting to become alive.
Analysis
The dead heron is a powerful, unforgettable image. The narrator is struck by the senselessness of the killing and concludes it must be the Americans (who later turn out to be Canadians, but “Americanism” is a trait, a disease, not just a nationality). Right after, she realizes she can no longer kill a fish, for “I had no right to. We didn’t need it, our proper food was in tin cans. We were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they called it, these were no longer the right reasons” (121). She also releases the frogs, which slip into the water, “green with black leopard spots and gold eyes, rescued” (121). This day is important for her understanding of her role in the world, and the times when she did not live according to a proper moral code. She thinks of how animals had “no spokesman” (131), and that while she knows wars and genocides are terrible, the death of the heron bothers her more because it was “causeless, undiluted” (131). She feels a “sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there and watched without saying No or doing anything to stop it” (131). This complicity is affirmed for her in her memories of how she was partially responsible for her brother torturing and killing creatures, and how she would only watch when he would kill leeches that he randomly labeled “the bad kind.”
The climax of the novel is the narrator’s dive and concomitant realization that she had been sustaining a delicate web of lies about herself in order to preserve her sanity—she was not married to the art professor, and, more importantly, she did not bear the child but instead, at the man’s urging, had an abortion. The drowning brother she always saw was her aborted child, and she cannot “accept it, that mutilation, ruin I’d made” (144). This is also why she left her family, since “Their own innocence, the reason I couldn’t tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their artificial garden, greenhouse. They didn’t teach us about evil, they didn’t understand it, how could I describe it to them?” (145).
Her pain is so acute and the recognition of its reality so stunning to her that she reaches out and grasps something that can help—the indigenous gods of the land. She believes that “These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely” (146). She also starts to suspect that not only did her father leave her clues, her mother also left her a gift; “It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy. His was complicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final. I was not completed yet; there had to be a gift from each of them” (150). And since she is also feeling the pressure of the world she is inhabiting, she knows that “I needed to find it, the thing she had hidden; the power from my father’s intercession wasn’t enough to protect me, it gave only knowledge and there were more gods than his” (154).
That gift from her mother is, in her estimation, an image in the scrapbook. She feels that one particular volume is “heavier and warmer” (159), and she opens to a page that has an inscrutable image of a “woman with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her gazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail” (159). She decides that these are her goddess and they will protect her, protect her from the others and from the world. Josie P. Campbell acknowledges that the image is ambiguous, and explains that “The narrator never explicitly states the meaning of the pictograph, but rather enacts its meaning. The drawing suggests a way for her of closing ‘the break’ in her psyche… The second part of Surfacing ends on a note of hope which looks toward the last part of the novel.”
Naturally, critics have a great deal to say about the diving scene. Meera T. Clark explains that as the narrator “dives and dives again into the lake which mirrors her own sternly repressed, unconscious self, she at last finds what she has come to find: the power of the gods which resides with the dead, and the power which resides in the unconscious. As she surfaces from the lake, her lost and buried self also surfaces to her consciousness, and she finally confronts the image of her aborted baby. She finds, or rather, recovers that power when she confronts death-both emotional and physical. She faces up to her father's death and her own emotional death. For her inner, feeling self had died in the process of repressing her pain over her aborted child.” Ronald Granofsky discusses the scene in terms of fairy tale structure: “The narrator's descent into the depths of the lake, in terms of folktale morphology, is a ‘spatial transference between two kingdoms,’ whereby ‘the hero is transferred, delivered, or led to the whereabouts of an object of search’... After her dive and the discovery of the objects of her search, her father's corpse and the truth of the abortion, the narrator gradually regresses along the evolutionary path in an act of solidarity with her aborted fetus, her dead parents (whom she sees as animals), and the violated environment around her.” Roberta Rubenstein details what the narrator experiences and realizes: “the narrator's spiritual malaise is revealed as a product of her separation not only from the future (the unborn child) but the past (her dead parents). Her descent into her deeper self discloses the poverty of the conventional religious values she had only partly assimilated; the reality of her father's death (the death of her childhood 'god') is the catalyzing shock which forces her guilt to surface.” And finally, Arnold and Cathy Davidson explicate this moment within myth: “In this passage, Atwood stresses the connection between the lost father and the lost child. The drowned father, with his camera cord around his neck, had resembled a fetus strangled by its umbilical cord. The narrator must dive down into the lake to find the dead father before she can surface to the admission that she has no child. Metaphorically, she can recover her dead child only after she discovers her dead father— both in the 'redemptive' lake. Furthermore, the metaphor of the fetus-like father closes a symbolic circle. Re-emerging from the lake (a classic female symbol), the daughter has figuratively become her father's mother ready to conceive herself. No wonder she can surface with a new concept of fecundity. Her psychic journey back into her past has allowed her to discover herself and to find within herself something worth perpetuating. She is nearing the end of her mythic journey.”
