A Study On Unnatural Death In The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin(2000)is one of the representative works of Margaret Atwood who is a famous and influential writer in the contemporary Canadian literature.This book won Atwood the Booker Prize—an authoritative award for British Literature,marking her new level of creativity.The work has been highly praised by critics since it was published,but they tended to focus on the mise en abyme narrative structure and feminism in the work.In comparison,there are fewer critical works on thematic studies,and the motif of "death" is rarely tackled.In The Atwood describes various death scenes of the characters,to render the book impressive and unique among all her works.It can be found that the death modes of different characters in the novel are also different,but without exception,all of them die unnaturally.Through the interpretation of various unnatural deaths,this thesis aims to analyze the social conflicts and operation of violence behind these deaths,and the author's reflections on Canadian society in the last century.This thesis is composed of three parts—introduction,main body and conclusion.In addition to introduction that provides a comprehensive survey of the studies on Atwood and The Blind Assassin,and conclusion,the main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters in order to study the representations,causes and aftermaths of unnatural deaths respectively.The first chapter focuses on different categories of deaths,namely suicide,murder and sacrifice,to explore the power relations behind these modes of death.The analysis shows that unnatural death is a manifestation of power operations.Specifically,suicide is representative of conscious self-destruction,murder is to exert violence on others,and sacrifice implies the violence imposed on individual life by the sovereign power.The second chapter analyzes the causes of unnatural deaths from three perspectives:individual,familial and societal.The occurrence of unnatural deaths may directly or initially result from personal psychological dysfunctions,disintegration of family system and social turmoil,though in some cases these factors interweave with each other and jointly lead to the death of the characters.Among these causes,the social unrest caused by war and economic recession has led to the adjustment of social power structure,which functions fundamentally as the root cause of unnatural deaths.The third chapter concentrates on the impacts of unnatural deaths on three levels,namely individuals in direct encounter with the deceased,families affected and Canadian society in general.Unnatural deaths bring about negative impacts such as personal psychological trauma and the disintegration of family system.Moreover,on the social level,in order to protect themselves from being sacrificed by the sovereign power,people challenge the original power structure and explore new paths for social development.During this process,more unnatural deaths occur.It suggests that the violence is characterized by continuity and transferability.Analyses reveal that the deaths of the characters are not just accidental cases,but represent the situations of different groups of Canadian society.Causes of the occurrences of these deaths and the power relations beneath all point to a grander and wider influence—the disturbance of the two world wars to people's otherwise normal life.In this case,it seems that Margaret Atwood assigns the character's death a grand social meaning,which reflects her thinking over power relations of the society and her concern for invisible control over people's lives by the sovereign power.Therefore,by analyzing the phenomenon of unnatural deaths in the novel,this thesis helps to unlock the literary codes of this novel and explore deeper into its social meaning.