Blind And Insights

Acclaimed as "the Queen of Canadian Literature", Margaret Atwood, compared with other writers who are pigeonholed as postmodernists, is nothing out of the way both in terms of subject matter and her style. And we can even go so far as to say that she somewhat runs counter to the postmodernist's dismissal of the transcendental objectives. However, what she terms herself is an existentialist role, an "eye witness", and her writings, for my part, are just the same distinctly existential, resonate with the ethics of engagement in particular, echoing its preoccupation with willing-participation, reflection, revelation, and transcendence.Getting engaged with the entire Atwoodian textual world, I've found that, if the notion of engagement just serves as a starting point for Atwood's thematic preoccupations in her earlier novels, then in The Blind Assassin, which is hailed as "an evolution of all her previous works", the ethics of engagement has become one of the predominant themes to which the novel's every bit and piece rivets. This advancement, like any other, merits our serious attention.The Blind Assassin is a mis-en abyme narrative focusing on Iris Chase, the octogenarian protagonist's retrospective construction of her life story. In an intriguing way in which fantasy meets realism, Atwood gains her point in problematizing the essentialist stereotypes that constrict women's rights as an ever-developing being, while at the same time, she succeeds in bringing home the blindness, partiality and the disastrous consequence of women's "victim" and "outsider" mentality growing under the persecution of the patriarchal culture, thereby, in the hope of bringing about women's vision and recognition of their creative power in shaping their own life verses, calls forth women's self-retrospection on their role of accomplice in the continuation of sexual politics. Set in the theoretical framework of Sartre's ethics of engagement, this paper attempts to explore the interplay between engagement, insight and blindness in the text through an analysis of the novel's inner structure and its narrative technique of incorporating theme into the external form, thus to illuminate the relevance of Atwood's use of the engagement ethics as the novel's running courseof deep structure and its outward form.The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to Atwood's existential ring manifested in her writings, interviews, critical essays, as well as in her social activities. Such a glance at Atwood's world serves as a lead-in of the point of my argument. The same chapter also includes a literature review of the previous research work done on The Blind Assassin, and a short summary of the ethics of engagement, both of which, I hope, will offer my thesis a more substantial ground.Respectively entitled as "Blinded in Bad Faith", "Engaged to See", and "Engaged to Create", the next three chapters will venture, step by step, further into Atwood's metaphoric territory by detailed textual analysis of the dynamics, rationales and relevance behind the heroine's blindness and insight.Chapter Five concludes the whole text by summing up the significance of the ensemble of my argumentation over, and discussion about the pervasiveness and relevance of the existentialist engagement in the novel in questioa The focus of the conclusion, however, lies on reiterating and pointing up the significance of Atwood's embracement, in The Blind Assassin, of the social commitment and man's worldly responsibility and possibility, either skirted over or played down by so many postmodernist writers, which are embodied in the ethics of engagement.