SOURCE: “‘Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood's Short Fiction,” in Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, New Critical Essays, edited by Colin Nicholson, St. Martin's Press, 1994, pp. 230–47.

In the following essay, Suarez traces the development of Atwood's narrative technique as evinced in her short fiction.

Margaret Atwood's creative world, as has repeatedly been noted, possesses a coherence which spreads across genres, its motifs and structures recurring in different texts, whether fiction, poetry or essay. In a study published in 1983 Sherill E. Grace attempts to describe this coherence by defining Atwood's system with reference to four elements: duality, nature, self and language.¹ While all four are found to some extent in any volume of Atwood's, it is the latter two that seem to dictate the literary function of nature and duality, and to constitute the key to the author's literary world. A reading of...