The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood (2000)
“A dying woman writes a memoir that reveals she — not her dead sister — authored the scandalous novel everyone attributes to the wrong Chase sister.”
Character Analysis
The elderly Iris is the novel's controlling intelligence — a dying woman composing a memoir that is simultaneously confession, self-defense, and love letter to the granddaughter she has lost. She is unreliable by design, revealing her deceptions strategically and judging her younger self with a clarity that does not extend to absolution. Her guilt over Laura's death is the memoir's engine, but Atwood refuses to reduce Iris to a guilty conscience. She is also funny, bitter, observant, and capable of extraordinary prose — which raises the question of whether the memoir is an act of truth-telling or another performance.
Educated, literary, sardonic. Long sentences with embedded self-correction. Formal vocabulary deployed with ironic precision.