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.”
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The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood (2000) · 521pages · Contemporary / Postmodern · 4 AP appearances
Summary
Elderly Iris Chase Griffen writes a memoir recounting the intertwined fates of two sisters in a Canadian industrial dynasty. Within Iris's memoir sits a posthumously published novel attributed to her sister Laura, which itself contains a nested science-fiction story told by a nameless lover. As Iris's account unfolds across decades — from their privileged 1930s childhood through war, betrayal, and arranged marriage — each narrative layer gradually exposes the others' deceptions, culminating in the revelation that Iris, not Laura, wrote 'The Blind Assassin,' and that the novel encodes an affair, a political conspiracy, and the true circumstances of Laura's death.
Why It Matters
Won the Booker Prize in 2000, confirming Atwood's status as a major international novelist. The novel is widely regarded as her most formally ambitious work — the triple-nested narrative structure influenced a generation of postmodern fiction. It demonstrated that structurally complex, intellectu...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Formal with layered registers — Iris's memoir voice is sardonic and precise; the affair narrative is stripped and present-tense; the Sakiel-Norn sections are quasi-mythological
Narrator: Iris Chase Griffen: retrospective, unreliable, self-aware about her unreliability. She tells us she is constructing a...
Figurative Language: Moderate to high
Historical Context
1920s-1940s Canada (primary narrative), 1990s Canada (frame), with embedded references to the Depression, Spanish Civil War, and WWII: The novel is inseparable from its historical moment. The Depression creates the economic conditions that force Iris's marriage. The political radicalism of the 1930s produces Alex Thomas. The war r...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Atwood construct a triple-nested narrative — memoir within novel within science-fiction story — rather than telling Iris's story directly? What does each layer accomplish that the others cannot?
- The novel opens with Laura's death and closes with Iris approaching her own. How does this frame of two deaths shape the reader's experience of everything between them?
- Iris tells us 'accuracy is not truth.' What distinction is she drawing, and how does this distinction operate throughout the novel?
- Why does Iris allow Laura to be credited as the author of 'The Blind Assassin'? Is this an act of generosity, guilt, cowardice, or something more complex?
- The Sakiel-Norn story features blind assassins and tongueless children. How do these figures operate as allegories for characters and conditions in the outer narratives?
Notable Quotes
“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”
“I'll try to be accurate. But accuracy is not truth.”
“Laura was not a joiner. She had too little instinct for self-preservation.”
Why Read This
Because this novel teaches you how narrative works — not through theory but through experience. Every assumption you make about who is speaking, who wrote what, and whose story you are reading is systematically overturned. By the time you reach th...