Structural Complexity and Its Effect on the Reader in Margaret Atwoods The Blind Assassin - Research Paper Example

?John Q. Doe English 344 8 May 2000 Structural Complexity and Its Effect on the Reader in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Blind Assassin, revolves around the life of two sisters, Iris Chase Griffen and Laura Chase. Though the novel concerns the lives of both characters, the focus is on Iris. Laura Chase dies in a car crash that is an apparent suicide shortly after the end of World War II. Iris is an elderly woman at the time of the novel, and her role as the center of the book becomes apparent throughout the course of the story. The narrative of The Blind Assassin is particularly complex. Three narrative threads weave throughout the book. In one of the threads, Iris Griffen is experiencing events of her present life while also reminiscing on past events. In the second thread, Atwood presents chapters from a novel published under Laura Chase’s name that detail a love affair between a young woman and man. Buried within the second thread is a third. During the love affair detailed in Laura Chase’s book, the two lovers meet and the man tells a science fiction story to his paramour. Atwood uses the structural narrative complexity of three narratives to manipulate the reader’s perception of the nature of narrative as well as how an author unfolds her narrative to her reader. The first effect of the structural complexity of the novel is that it creates a high degree of suspense by use of ambiguity. Atwood manipulates the unfolding of plot to hide details from the reader. One example of this technique is the first line of the novel: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove her car off a bridge” (Atwood 1). The explanation of this event is that Laura was driving on a bridge that was being repaired and her “tires may have caught on a streetcar track or the brakes may have failed” (2). There are two witnesses, however, who state that Laura deliberately drove off the bridge. They could see her hands on the wheel because she was wearing white gloves. By introducing ambiguity into the situation surrounding Laura Chase’s death, Atwood creates a novel that is essentially a murder mystery. As Earl Ingersoll notes, “the blunt assertion of this opening sentence generates immediate questions: Was it suicide or an accident? Why did it happen? Is there a culprit who triggered this apparent suicide?” Though there are three narrative threads, the main thread is the first person memoir of Iris Griffen. Though her narrative reveals many secrets, the main thrust of it is that it reveals why Laura Chase committed suicide. James Harold, in “Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind Assassin,” argues that the ambiguity of the novel creates suspense by drawing the reader into the story and making the reader an “implied author.” He argues that a story with the complexity and ambiguity of The Blind Assassin forces the reader to become an active part of the book. The reader must creatively imagine what is happening in the novel, and he does so by bringing his experience into the story itself. Because Atwood decides to withhold details from the reader, she creates suspense because the reader must supply details and assertions about the events occurring. Given Ingersoll’s comments, this point is especially salient since the novel is a murder mystery. A reader engaged in reading a murder mystery is constantly attempting to solve the mystery by looking for clues and using deductive reasoning. At the same time, Atwood is manipulating the reader by feeding him small facts throughout the book. The complexity of solving the murder mystery is that the majority of the evidence occurs in Iris Griffen’s first person memoir. The narrative drawn from Laura Chase’s book and the story the lover within it tells all distract the reader from the mystery. The reader must constantly engage in the book and collect details in order to solve the murder. In "Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin,” Barbara Dancygier explains the cognitive demands placed on the reader of the book are a result of the reader’s attempt to understand the events of the novel and the suicide of Laura Chase. In agreement with Harold, Dancygier views “the levels of narrative structure which operate between the text and the specific story or the story as a conceptualization device are numerous and intricate.” Thus, the reader becomes an active participant in creating meaning in the story. The reader is responsible for drawing connections between the three narratives and then using these connections to understand the death of Laura Chase. The overall effect of the book is suspense for the reader. Because so much information is hidden by the ambiguity of the narrators and Atwood’s manipulation of the plot, the reader feels compelled to continue reading. Each page promises a detail that might answer a question from an earlier narrative thread. Atwood also manages to manipulate the reader by switching between the three narrative threads at times of particular importance. Thus, when the reader is close to discovering an important detail about Iris’ life, Atwood will switch to Laura Chase’s novel. The result is that the suspense and tension of the novel build until the closing pages when the narratives merge. The second effect of the structural complexity of the novel is that it challenges the reader’s understanding of conventional narrative structure. When approaching a novel for a first reading, the reader expects to confront a conventional narrative that chronologically unfolds a conflict involving a character or characters. The Blind Assassin does not present the reader with this type of conventional narrative structure. As explained in the introduction, the novel is three narrative threads woven into a distinct whole. As Dancygier states, “the novel is a fragmented narrative.” The novel is fragmented in time as well as in narrator. Three different narrators unravel three different stories that move throughout time almost at random. The complexity deepens when Iris Griffen reveals that her sister, Laura, did not write the novel attributed to her. Instead, the novel is a memoir of an affair that Iris had as a young woman. She published the memoir as a piece of fiction under her sister’s name to hide the affair because of her marriage to a wealthy and socially prominent industrialist. So, two of the narratives are memoirs written by Iris Griffen. The first is her memoir of her life written as she is approaching death, and the second is her memoir of her affair with Alex Thomas written when she was a young woman and published as a work of fiction under her sister’s name. The third story is a weak science fiction story that Iris and her lover, Alex, create during their trysts detailed in the novel attributed to Laura Chase. Critic Barbara Dancygier argues that The Blind Assassin creates such a level of narrative complexity that it requires use of “narrative anchors” for the reader to comprehend the story. These anchors are details that the reader pulls from the three narrative threads and connects in his mind to create a conventional narrative. The reader essentially assembles a conventional chronological narrative by cognitively arranging the events of the novel to create a story that details the life of Iris Griffen, from child to old woman. As Dancygier puts it, “the resulting story is therefore a multi-layered network of narrative spaces which yields a sequence, even if only a roughly conceived one, as a consequence of its organization.” The reader is responsible for creating a cohesive story from a collection of fragments. Once he realizes that all of the narrative threads come from Iris Griffen, he is able to draw a picture of the life of Iris Griffen, who grew up the child a prominent industrialist, married a cruel rival of her father, engaged in an affair with pulp author Alex Thomas, published a memoir of the affair in her sister’s name after her sister’s suicide, and wrote a memoir of her entire life which she left to her only granddaughter. Thus, by the end of The Blind Assassin, the reader has a complete narrative that answers all the major questions originated in the novel. The reader knows that Laura Chase committed suicide because her sister had an affair with their mutual friend Alex Thomas, that Laura did not write a novel but had a novel published posthumously by her sister in Laura’s name, and Iris’ granddaughter will receive a book outlining the affair her grandmother conducted. Laura Stein agrees that the narrative structure of the novel is very complex. Instead of focusing on how book manipulates time in order to create complexity, she analyzes how the use of three different narrators contributes to the difficulty that a reader experiences in understanding The Blind Assassin. Stein notes, “the novel explores the ways that narrative works by secrecy and cunning, by concealing and revealing” (147). She explains that the different narrators all have different motives that cause them to retell stories for different purposes. Thus, the novel confronts the reader with some of the same events through the lens of three different narrators. Each narrator also has a specific purpose and alters events to that purpose. Iris Griffen uses “her story like a weapon” (147). In the memoir she leaves her granddaughter, Iris is attempting to provide justification for her actions. She wants to justify cheating on her husband and explain his ruthless behavior. Laura Chase changes events of her life to conceal that Iris’ husband sexually abuses her. Lastly, Alex Thomas creates a science fiction story about Sakiel Norn to draw attention to the social issues affecting Canadian society during the Depression as well as to propound his socialist views on the wealthy social classes. The subjectivity of each narrator does cause difficulty to the reader and result in a challenge to the understanding of conventional narrative structure. While unreliable narrators have appeared in fiction from the beginnings of literature and gained popularity with the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, novels usually only contain a single narrator. Thus, if that narrator is unreliable because he is too subjective or is compromised in some other way, the reader usually only must deal with doubts about the intentions of this single narrator. In The Blind Assassin, the reader must contend with three unreliable narrators. And, even though it is revealed that Iris wrote Laura Chase’s novel, the voice used in that novel still constitutes an unreliable narrator. In the end, the number of narrators presenting the same events creates a limitless variety of interpretations. It is almost impossible for the reader to deal with the number of doubts that arise in interpreting the narrative. The third effect of the structural complexity of the novel is that it allows Atwood to manipulate different narrative genres that play upon readers’ expectations. The Blind Assassin, because it is a novel with three narrative threads, is also a novel with many different narrative modes. The most prominent mode is memoir, as it is the mode employed by the protagonist Iris Chase Griffen. When faced with memoir, a reader expects to receive information about a person’s life. He also expects that this information will not be entirely factual but will represent an entertaining, suspenseful recounting of that person’s life. A second mode that Atwood employs within the novel is science fiction. The story told by the unnamed lover in Laura Chase’s novel (later revealed to be Alex Thomas) is a science fiction story about an alien world, Sakiel Norn. A reader expects the genre of science fiction to introduce fantasy but also to interweave commentary about human society. Lastly, The Blind Assassin is a historical novel that deals with the conditions of Canada during the Depression. This mode appears in Laura Chase’s novel as it is set during this period of Canadian history as well as in various newspaper reports that appear throughout The Blind Assassin. In the historical mode, the reader expects to encounter fictionalized events from the history of a country and possibly a critique of decisions made by people during that time. In her essay, “Atwood's Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin,” Hilde Staels argues that Atwood employs so many different modes of narrative in order to critique each. She argues that Atwood forces the reader to consider the manipulations present in historical fiction by producing a novel that a “patchwork quilt consisting of different types of text” from a mix historical writing. Thus, the story is told using newspaper clippings, memoir, letters, and other forms. The result is a postmodern pastiche of forms of writing and literature that have existed throughout history as well as the shortcomings of all of these. In using the mode of science fiction, Atwood critiques its exclusively male authorship in its early years. By having the science fiction story in Laura Chase’s novel told by the male lover, Atwood is calling attention to the fact that males were the primary authors of science fiction in the 1930s. However, the real author of Laura Chase’s novel is Iris, and by extension, the real author of the story of Sakiel Norn is Iris as well. Atwood is altering the reader’s expectations that a science fiction story from this time period would be written by a male. Additionally, Staels argues that Atwood employs the mode of memoir to create a parody of the genre of bildungsroman. In Iris’ memoir is a coming-of-age story, but it is a coming-of-age story that an eighty-three year old woman is telling. As such, the events of the story are very hazy for Iris because so much time has passed for her since their occurrence. In most bildungsromans, the narrator experiences the journey from childhood to adulthood in real-time, but in The Blind Assassin, the narrator experiences the journey merely as a reflection, making it a parody of the genre. Overall, the different effects of the narrative complexity of the novel all work together to create a novel of extraordinary depth. Atwood’s novels have always been respected for the suspense of their plotting. In A Handmaid’s Tale, the reader pursues Offred’s story as she pursues escape from her oppressive society. The Blind Assassin is no different in this respect. The reader pursues the conclusion of each story. He wants to know why Laura Chase has decided to commit suicide when there seems to be no reasonable explanation. He wants to know what the importance of Iris Griffen’s memoir is. Why is she telling her story at this particular point in her life? He wants to know who the two lovers meeting and creating the story of Sakiel Norn are, and what is their importance to the story of Iris. Whereas most novels only contain a single or at most two questions driving the conflict in the narrative, Atwood, in The Blind Assassin, offers many questions and withholds her answers until the end. The manner in which Atwood manipulates conventional narrative structure is a work of art. While most postmodern novels employ multiple narrative threads and point-of-views to critique the creation of fiction itself, Atwood so carefully plots The Blind Assassin that the reader can easily read and understand the story. But, the complexity of the structure draws attention to how much the narrative demands of the reader. The presence of multiple unreliable narrators as well as multiple events that the reader must rearrange chronologically calls into question the nature of conventional narrative. The end result is that the reader questions whether an author tells a story or invites a reader to create a story with her. Lastly, the narrative complexity of The Blind Assassin creates a parody and critique of the different genres that Atwood employs. The reader finds himself keeping track of all the plot manipulations and point-of-view changes and only upon finishing the book realizes that Atwood has used the characteristics of several different genres in order to deliberately mislead the reader. The entire novel is a bait-and-switch on the part of Atwood. When the reader believes that the novel will conform to a certain genre, Atwood violates that genre. When the reader believes that he will receive an answer that will relieve some of the suspense of the novel, Atwood does not provide it. When the reader believes that he can trust one of the narrators, Atwood reveals events that make that narrator unreliable. At the conclusion of the novel, the reader realizes that Atwood has manipulated all of his expectations, but this manipulation is what makes the novel such a joy to read. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. 1st. New York: Anchor, 2000. Print. Dancygier, Barbara. "Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin." Style 41.2 (2007): 133-152. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. Harold, James. "Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind Assassin." Philosophy & Literature 29.1 (2005): 130-145. Humanities International Complete. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. Ingersoll, Earl. "Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin." Studies in the Novel 35.4 (2003): 543-558.Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. Staels, Hilde. "Atwood's Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin." English Studies 85.2 (2004): 147-160. Humanities International Complete. Web. 17 Mar. 2012. Stein, Karen. "A Left-handed Story: The Blind Assassin."Margaret Atwood's textual assassinations: recent poetry and fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2003. 135-52. Print. Read More