70 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodThe Blind Assassin
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Books 12–13 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 12 Summary
This book opens with two newspaper articles. The first, from 1938, describes a speech Richard made praising Neville Chamberlain for signing the Munich Accord and securing peace in Europe: "[a] strong, healthy Germany, he claimed, was in the interests of the West, and of business in particular" (455). The speech was well received and taken as a sign of Richard's interest in politics. The other article describes an Ottawa garden party held in honor of the visiting King and Queen of England. Richard and Iris attended and "were singled out" for presentation (456).
Meanwhile, as the novel-within-a-novel draws toward a close, the woman meets the man at the train station and the two go to a cheap hotel. The woman questions her lover about the follow-up to the story about Xenor and Zycron, and he says he couldn't finish it because he was "too busy getting shot at" in the Spanish Civil War (460). After resting, however, he admits that he’ll return to Europe if another war breaks out, and his lover begins crying. When we next see her, World War II is underway, and she is fantasizing about leaving her home and waiting for her lover to return:
[s]he'll rent a room, an inexpensive room but not too dingy—nothing a coat of paint won't brighten up. She'll write a letter saying she isn't coming back. They'll send emissaries, ambassadors, then lawyers, they'll threaten, they'll penalize, she'll be afraid all the time but she'll hold firm. She'll burn all her bridges except the bridge to him, even though the bridge to him is so tenuous" (463–464).
In the end, however, she stays where she is, and eventually receives a telegram informing her of her lover's death. That night, she dreams her lover is underneath the chestnut tree outside her window. The two go out on the roofand look out over the city, which is on fire. The woman associates the burning city with Zycron and is distressed, saying it was "so beautiful" (469). The man retorts that they "had to fight fire with fire," but that someone will rebuild the city, because "they always do" (469). The woman realizes the man is dead as he recedes into the distance, and she wakes up crying.
Book 13 Summary
Iris thinks increasingly about her impending death; her doctor has informed her that she would likely need a heart transplant to survive, and Iris says she is "not sure [she] could live with [herself], knowing [she] was carrying the heart of a dead child," (475). She watches news on TV, and comments wearily on the unending cycles of war overseas.
This leads Iris into her memories of World War II, which she says "went on and on, a relentless motor. It wore people down—the constant, dreary tension. It was like listening to someone grinding his teeth, in the dusk before dawn, while you lie sleepless night after night after night" (481).For the most part, however, Iris focuses on her personal life, explaining how her marriage began to unravel due to a series of miscarriages, affairs, and Richard's struggles to distance himself from his former admiration of Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the war ends, Iris meets with Laura for the last time. Laura explains what she has been doing for the past several years and reaffirms that she was sent to BellaVista because she was pregnant. Iris asks who the father was and, assuming it was Alex, questions whether Laura was in love with him. Laura responds that "it was horrible…but [she] had to make the sacrifice" in order to save Alex, and Iris begins to wonder whether Laura is insane after all (487). Laura explains that Callie was keeping Richard informed of Alex's whereabouts, but still does not explicitly state that Richard was rapingher. Instead, she tells Iris she has returned to Toronto so that Alex, returning home from the war, will be able to find her. Her "iron-clad confidence" irritates Iris, and in a moment of frustration, she tells Laura that Alex is dead, and that she had received news of this because they were lovers (487). Laura doesn't respondbut takes Iris's purse (and keys) and drives away in her sister's car.
Iris returns home and waits to hear from Laura. The following day, a policeman shows up and informs her that Laura was killed in a car accident. Iris calls Richard to explain what has happened and then prepares to leave for the morgue. While she's dressing, however, she finds a bundle of Laura's exercise books in her drawers. Iris says she "could have stopped there," but that she "chose knowledge instead," the way "most of us will" (494).
Books 12–13 Analysis
With the dream sequence that closes Book Twelve, Atwood begins to weave several of the novel's major themes together. Although it is a response to a personal tragedy—the death of the woman's lover—the dream merges this private loss with the apocalyptic destruction of an entire society (Sakiel-Norn, but also, by implication, all the places destroyed by WWII). For the woman, the burning city is an emblem of a paradise that she has lost and cannot return to: "Zycron, she thinks. Beloved planet, land of my heart. Where once, long ago, I was happy" (469). As he did during their storytelling sessions, however, the man challenges the woman's grief over the loss of happiness; when the woman protests that the city was "beautiful," he remarks that it was only beautiful "for some," and that it had to be destroyed for that reason (469).He also cynically remarks that the city will eventually be rebuilt, alluding to Atwood's depiction of history as cyclical and inevitable.
Perhaps most importantly, the sequence further blurs the lines that separate reality from fiction, collapsing Sakiel-Norn and the city in which the woman lives (Toronto) into one location. The entire episode is also a dream, which introduces a further element of unreality to its events. The fact that the scenenevertheless touches on so many of the novel's themes perhaps helps explain The Blind Assassin's complex structure; by blending fantasy and realism and embedding multiple, overlapping stories withinone another, Atwood creates a narrative effect that mimics the fluidity of reality and interpersonal relationships.
Book Thirteen also ends with a pivotal death: Laura's, which Iris inadvertently brings about. Atwood depicts this as a somewhat inevitable conclusionto the sisters' relationship; Iris, annoyed as ever by Laura's optimism, likens her decision to reveal the truth about the affair to pushing Laura off the ledge at Avilion, a comparison that suggests her actions have been years in the making. The circumstances surrounding Laura's death also mark the final clash betweenthe worldviews each sister represents. Iris, for instance, suggests that her sister simply couldn't cope with knowing that reality did not live up to her ideals. But while Iris admits she ought to have lied (thus allowing Laura to keep her fantasy); she also defends the practice of "choosing knowledge," however painful it is: “[m]ost of us will [choose knowledge]. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on" (494). This passage echoes the Biblical association between knowledge (i.e. the Tree of Knowledge) and suffering (i.e. expulsion from Eden), anticipating the ultimate rejection of "paradise" as a kind of prison in Iris's novel.
Related Titles
By Margaret Atwood
