A Voyage to the Fragmented Borders of Self and the Merging Boundaries of Identity in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the merging boundaries of “Self” in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, a novel written in 1972. Atwood explores the inner conflict of the protagonist and pursues the gender roles and discriminations towards women. The narrator is suppressed in the wilderness, and during her journey, she is looking for her past. The novel shows that the fractured sense of self such as interpersonal relationship, self-image, and identity begins from childhood. More specifically, the novel attempts to search for the identity and survival of the self in a postmodern society. The main objective of this study is to identify the mental, psychological, and spiritual boundaries of self in this society. Moreover, the research takes a feminist approach to explore the ways the narrator utilizes to build and preserve the boundaries of self, which resulted in the self-realization at the end of the novel. These practices include turning in to the feelings and emotions, seeking support from others, considering the past and childhood life, and improving self-awareness and self-care. Moreover, we categorized and elaborated the boundaries of self in three separate categories: female subjectivity, fake identities and ideology, and landscape, nature, and cultural aspects. Atwood illustrates the subjugation of nature and women by the Western culture throughout a journey to the past and to the forgotten territories of the protagonist’s psyche paralleling them with the remote Canadian forest areas and taking advantage of narrative strategies that contribute to the psychoanalytical theme of the novel.