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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Blind Assassin, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling, Narrative, and Truth
Doomed Love
Oppression vs. Resistance
Violence and Death
Emulation, Repetition, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
Ten days after the end of World War II, Iris Chase’s sister Laura drives her car off a bridge. The policeman who tells Iris what happened says it must have been an accident involving the car brakes, although two witnesses both claimed they saw Laura deliberately turn the car. Iris doesn’t think it was an accident and explains that Laura “had her reasons.” However, she tells the policeman that she’s sure it was an accident. Before her death, Laura hid a stack of exercise books inside Iris’s stocking drawer to make sure Iris found them. When Iris comes across these, she thinks about her nursemaid and housekeeper, Reenie, who would always attend to Iris when she hurt herself as a child.
The beginning of the novel introduces the idea of conflicting narratives and the relationship of narratives to truth. The police officer chooses to tell one story about Laura’s death which characterizes it as an accident, and Iris agrees with this story even though she doesn’t it’s true. In this sense, she and the police officer choose to participate in a fictional version of reality that is more respectable or palatable than the truth.
Active
Themes
A Toronto Star newspaper article dated May 26, 1945 describes Laura’s death as “accidental.” It says that Laura was 25 and notes that her sister Iris is the wife of Richard Griffen, a “prominent manufacturer.” The police believe that the accident was caused by one of the car tires catching an exposed streetcar track.
The fact that Iris’s husband, Richard, is a “prominent manufacturer” indicates the kinds of social expectations and pressures to which she (and the rest of her family) are subjected. It’s likely that Iris and her family are expected to uphold a certain level of public decorum since they’re of a high social class.
Active
Themes
The prologue to The Blind Assassin written by Laura Chase and published in 1947, is entitled Perennials for the Rock Garden. The prologue describes an unnamed woman looking at the only photo she has of her unnamed lover. In the photo, the couple are eating a picnic underneath a tree. She is smiling at the man “in a way she can’t remember smiling at anyone since.” In the corner of the picture there is someone else’s hand, the only part of their body that is visible in the photo.
