Framing of Identity and Personal History through Multiperspective Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling. The novel is dominated by the character and voice of Iris Chase, an octogenarian who slowly and fumblingly presents to the reader the fragmented and complex personal history of her family. The novel becomes an exercise in historiography through Iris’s visitations to her and her sister Laura’s youth in order to explain their tenuous relationship which is achieved through three parallel sources: Iris’s own attempts at a memoir, journalistic documents and letters from the past, and excerpts from an infamous novel published forty years previously. My paper will explore the three narrative structures present in the novel, and attempt to understand the questions of authorship and writing, and their importance in building a historiographic narrative. It will try to examine the ways in which retrospective interventions into public history helps to counter and create identities which were hitherto repressed under social decorum. This paper will borrow from Linda Hutcheon’s writings of the postmodern metanarratives in order to compose a lucid understanding of what alternative historiography in literature can achieve, keeping at the centre Atwood’s novel.