SOURCE: "Refusing to be a Victim: Margaret Atwood," in her Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, Beacon Press, 1980, pp. 41-53.

In the following essay, Christ offers an analysis of Surfacing, focusing on the protagonist's quest for self-discovery and Atwood's focus on nature and power in the novel.

The spiritual quest of the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing begins with her return to the Canadian wilderness, where she had lived as a child. Ostensibly, the protagonist is in search of her missing father, who is presumed dead. But the search is really for her missing parents, her mother having died a few years earlier, and for the power she feels it was their duty to have communicated to her. The external detective story of the protagonist's search for her father is paralleled by an internal search—half obscured by her obsession with her father—to discover how...