The Blind Assassin contains several stories embedded within one another. The main narrative, which is told from the perspective of Iris Chase Griffen, also contains excerpts from a novel supposedly written by Iris’s dead sister, Laura (although it is eventually revealed that the novel was actually written by Iris). This novel, like Atwood’s book, is called The Blind Assassin. There are then references to yet another narrative within Iris’s novel The Blind Assassin, a science-fiction story written by the unnamed man who is one of that novel’s main characters. This structure is known as mise-en-abyme, a phrase that refers to the placement of multiple stories inside one another in a repeated, mirroring pattern. Atwood uses this structural technique to add complexity to the main narrative, suggesting that any single story could be told in multiple different ways. Moreover, the use of other narratives draws attention to the act of storytelling itself, showing how storytelling inevitably involves some manipulation of the truth. The novel’s many references to writing and storytelling are examples of metafiction, a term that describes instances in which fiction contains references to the act of producing fiction. Of the multiple layers of interconnected stories within the novel, none is fully reliable; in each of them, the truth is represented (or manipulated) in a slightly different way. Through these nested stories, Atwood suggests that the truth is not necessarily fixed—it contains conflicting layers and interpretations, just like the novel itself.
At the outset of the book, the reader might be inclined to trust that the account provided by Iris is the full truth. However, by placing conflicting narratives within the main story and playing with questions of how (and by whom) these narratives are constructed, Atwood encourages the reader to be skeptical about the idea that any single narrative contains the truth. The most obvious way that the novel casts doubt on the trustworthiness of narratives is simply by featuring so many different narratives within it, each written from different perspectives and telling conflicting stories. For example, the book is peppered with newspaper articles that provide accounts of some of the most important events in the narrative, including the deaths of Iris’s husband Richard, her daughter Aimee, and her sister Laura. Yet while newspapers are supposed to contain neutral, objective, and factually-accurate descriptions of reality, the reader immediately learns that this is not actually the case. In the newspaper article describing Laura’s death, the article suggests that the crash was an accident, caused either by a tire getting caught on a streetcar track or by headaches that impaired Laura’s vision. However, just before this article, Iris indicates that she thinks Laura’s death was a suicide: “It wasn’t the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons.” In this case, the newspaper provides the false account, whereas Iris’s own narrative contains what the novel suggests is most likely to be the truth due to the fact that she knew Laura better than anyone else. Yet at the same time, the fact that no one can really know for sure what was going through Laura’s head before the crash reminds the reader that the full truth is often difficult to access and that people must settle for conflicting accounts that may or may not contain elements of truth.
Further, the book complicates the notion of truthful storytelling through the novel that Laura supposedly writes, The Blind Assassin. This novel within Atwood’s novel of the same name is a roman-à-clef, meaning that it reflects reality (or, at least, the reality of the main narrative) in a coded way. It appears in fragments interspersed with the main narrative of the novel, and the reader must therefore read carefully in order to interpret how they think the events of Laura’s novel map onto those of the main narrative. For example, the fact that the Laura’s novel tells the story of a clandestine love affair between a wealthy woman and a political radical/science-fiction writer seems to indicate that Laura herself had an affair with the real-life Alex Thomas, who obviously resembles the unnamed male character in the novel. Yet as time goes on, hints surface that Laura isn’t actually the author of The Blind Assassin—Iris is. This means that it was Iris, not Laura, who was actually having the affair. Through this, Atwood suggests that while narrative can provide clues about the truth, these clues are often false, misleading, or subject to misinterpretation.
At the same time, the novel doesn’t simply suggest that storytelling’s inherent subjectivity is what obscures the full truth within narratives. Indeed, when Iris reveals that she, not Laura, is the true writer of The Blind Assassin, she explains that this doesn’t mean that Laura had no input: “I can’t say Laura didn’t write a word. Technically that’s accurate, but in another sense—what Laura would have called the spiritual sense—you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.” The final sentence of this quotation indicates that stories have a kind of life of their own, even if they are a product of an individual person’s memories and imagination. Both Iris and Laura participated in writing The Blind Assassin because both of them lived the events that inspired the novel. This idea is further conveyed by the lack of quotation marks across the entire narrative, which often make it somewhat unclear whose view is being expressed. Iris may be the actual writer of the novel(s) the reader encounters, but that doesn’t mean she wrote them alone. Truth, then, is not a single objective reality but a woven fabric made up of many different people’s subjective accounts.
Atwood extends this idea by suggesting that subjectivity can be seen as a kind of truth even when that subjectivity is unreliable, as is the case with Iris’s memories. In the same passage in which Iris reveals she is the author of The Blind Assassin, she writes, “I didn’t think of what I was doing as writing—just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth.” By casting both subjective memories and imagination as “the truth,” Iris encourages the reader to let go of the idea that there is any one fixed “truth” and instead to embrace the concept that the truth is made of multiple, sometimes contradictory, layers.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Storytelling, Narrative, and Truth ThemeTracker
Storytelling, Narrative, and Truth Quotes in The Blind Assassin
She seems very young in the picture, too young, though she hadn’t considered herself too young at the time. He’s smiling too—the whiteness of his teeth shows up like a scratched match flaring—but he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking at him though the square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to protect her.
The Ygnirods were resentful of their lot in life, but concealed this with the pretense of stupidity. Once in a while they would stage a revolt, which would then be ruthlessly suppressed. The lowest among them were slaves, who could be bought and traded and also killed at will. They were prohibited by law from reading, but had secret codes that they scratched in the dirt with stones. The Snilfards harnessed them to ploughs.
The carpets were woven by slaves who were invariably children, because only the fingers of children were small enough for such intricate work. But the incessant close labour demanded of these children caused them to go blind by the age of eight or nine, and their blindness was the measure by which the carpet-sellers valued and extolled their merchandise: This carpet blinded ten children, they would say. This blinded fifteen, this twenty.
I tell you the stories I’m good at, he says. Also the ones you’ll believe. You wouldn’t believe sweet nothings, would you?
No. I wouldn’t believe them.
When I was the age for it—thirteen, fourteen—I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered beds of ornamentals, and see her trailing wistfully through the grounds in a white lace tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile. Soon I added a lover. She would meet this lover outside the conservatory, which by that time was neglected—my father had no interested in steam-heated orange trees—but I restored it in my mind, and it supplied it with hothouse flowers […]
In reality the chances of Adelia having had a lover were nil. The town was too small, its morals too provincial, she had too far to fall. She wasn’t a fool. Also she had no money of her own.
And then, after the wedding, there was the war. Love, then marriage, then catastrophe. In Reenie’s version, it seemed inevitable.
Like many peoples, ancient and modern, the Zycronians are afraid of virgins, dead ones especially. Women betrayed in love who have died unmarried are driven to seek in death what they’ve so unfortunately missed out on in life.
I feel sorry for him. I think he’s only doing the best he can.
I think we need another drink. How about it?
I bet you’re going to kill him off. You have that glint.
In all justice he’d deserve it. I think he’s a bastard, myself. But kings have to be, don’t they? Survival of the fittest and so forth. Weak to the wall.
You don’t really believe that.
Although I was beginning to like him better, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more than a little skeptical about this story. There was too much melodrama in it—too much luck, both bad and good. I was still too young to be a believer in coincidence. And if he’d been trying to make an impression on Laura—was he trying?—he couldn’t have chosen a better way.
Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money—any money at all—or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said.
You might say he grabbed what he could get. Why wouldn’t he? He had no scruples, his life was dog eat dog and it always had been. Or you could say they were both young so they didn’t know any better. The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds. And I haven’t said he didn’t kill her afterwards. As I’ve pointed out, he was nothing if not self-interested.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging as a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Impossible, of course.
But it’s too good to be true, said Will. It must be a trap. It may even be some devilish mind-device of the Xenorians, to keep us from being in the war. It’s Paradise, but we can’t get out of it. And anything you can’t get out of is Hell.
But this isn’t Hell. It’s happiness, said one of the Peach Women who was materializing from the branch of a nearby tree. There’s nowhere to go from here. Relax. Enjoy yourselves. You’ll get used to it.
And that’s the end of the story.
That’s it? She says. You’re going to keep those two men cooped up in there forever?
I did what you wanted. You wanted happiness.
I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t’ necessarily get you the truth.
The sudden invasion changes things for the Zycronians. Barbarians and urbanites, incumbents and rebels, masters and slaves—all forget their differences and make common cause. Class barriers dissolve—the Snilfards discard their ancient titles along with their face masks, and roll up their sleeves, manning the barricades alongside the Ygnirods.
Laura herself didn’t know it, of course. She had no thought of playing the romantic heroine. She became that only later, in the frame of her own outcome and thus in the minds of her admirers. In the course of daily life she was frequently irritating, like anyone. Or dull. Or joyful, she could be that as well: given the right conditions, the secret of which was known only to her, she could drift off into a kind of rapture.
I was relieved: all might yet be well. Laura was still in town. She would talk to me later.
She has, too, though she tends to repeat herself, as the dead have a habit of doing. They say all the things they said to you in life; but they rarely say anything new.
How can I describe the pool of grief into which I was now falling? I can’t describe it, and so I won’t try.
What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of the thirsty ghosts.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
As for the book, Laura didn’t write a word of it. But you must have known for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t think of what I was doing as writing—just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth.
It was no great leap from that to naming Laura as the author. You might decide it was cowardice that inspired me, or a failure of nerve—I’ve never been fond of spotlights. Or simple prudence: my own name would have guaranteed the loss of Aimee, whom I lost in any case. But on second thought it was merely doing justice, because I can’t say Laura didn’t write a word. Technically that’s accurate, but in another sense—what Laura would have called the spiritual sense—you could say she was my collaborator. The real author was neither one of us: a fist is more than the sum of its fingers.
The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there’s a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It’s the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.
