A Study Of The Death Metaphor In The Blind Assassin By Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a famous Canadian novelist,poetess and literary critic,known as the "Queen of Canadian Literature".The Blind Assassin,a novel published in 2000,has won the annual Man Booker Prize,praised by the jury for its superb form art,poetic language and profound themes.This paper suggests that the uniqueness of The Blind Assassin lies in that the author had written a large number of characters’ deaths.The death of each character implies profound cultural,historical,religious and psychological reasons,and each character’s death has a great impact on Iris.Based on the above background,this paper intends to analyze the death metaphor in the novel.The paper is divided into three parts.The first part includes the first chapter,the introduction,which makes a brief introduction to Margaret Atwood’s life experience and her concept of death,a summary of the main content of The Blind Assassin,and an elucidation of the research purpose and significance of this paper,and a summarization of the current domestic and foreign research on The Blind Assassin.The second part covers the second chapter to the fourth chapter,the main part of the article.Mainly under the three dimensions of death by disease,suicide and war,it first analyzes the causes of each character’s death and the impacts of death on Iris,and then explores the metaphorical significance of each death mode according to these reasons and impacts.The last part is the sixth chapter,the summary of the whole paper,mainly combing the structure and the research findings of this paper.Through careful analysis,this paper finds that in The Blind Assassin,death by disease is a metaphor for the suppression of individual subject consciousness by traditional morality,rigid religious dogma’s harm to individual physical and mental health,and society’s long-term denial of women’s self-value;suicide death is a metaphor for the influence of social power on personal fate,the misleading of false public opinion,and the blindness and insight of human nature;and death in war is a metaphor for the stifling of personal ideals by war violence,the incomparably insignificance and frailty of human beings in the face of modern well-equipped war,and the extensive harm of war to human beings.In brief,the death metaphor is an important theme that cannot be ignored in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin.An in-depth analysis of the metaphorical meaning behind the death of the characters not only enables readers to penetrate Margaret Atwood’s deep concern for personal fate and social development,and her intense condemnation of war,but also stirs them to reflect on these issues.