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.”
Language 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
Syntax Profile
Iris's memoir narration employs long, carefully subordinated sentences with frequent parenthetical asides — the syntax of someone who has spent decades constructing and revising her account. The affair narrative uses shorter, more declarative sentences in the present tense, creating urgency and immediacy. The Sakiel-Norn passages adopt archaic, paratactic constructions ('And then,' 'And so') that evoke oral storytelling traditions. Atwood shifts between these three syntactic registers to signal narrative-level transitions.
Figurative Language
Moderate to high — Atwood favors precise metaphor over extended imagery. Key metaphors (blindness, weaving, bridges, fire) recur across all three narrative levels, creating a web of symbolic correspondences. Simile is relatively rare; Atwood prefers the declarative force of metaphor.
Era-Specific Language
Small-scale manufacturing — anchors the family's wealth in unglamorous industrial production
Psychiatric institution — euphemism for the forced institutionalization of inconvenient women
Cold War-era political labels applied to Alex Thomas and labor organizers
Period-appropriate upper-class address used by Richard Griffen's social circle
Novel based on real events — applied to Laura's posthumous book by reviewers
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Iris Chase Griffen
Educated, literary, sardonic. Long sentences with embedded self-correction. Formal vocabulary deployed with ironic precision.
A woman who has had fifty years to polish her account. The polish itself is a form of control — Iris manages her narrative the way Winifred managed her social calendar.
Laura Chase
Direct, literal, unadorned. Short sentences. Takes figurative language at face value.
Laura's linguistic literalism is both her integrity and her vulnerability — she cannot perform the social fictions that protect other characters.
Richard Griffen
Corporate, declarative, controlling. Uses language to foreclose discussion rather than invite it.
Old money speaks in commands, not requests. Richard's diction assumes obedience.
Alex Thomas
Politically inflected, storytelling-oriented. Shifts between activist rhetoric and pulp-fiction narration.
A man performing multiple identities — intellectual, activist, lover, storyteller — whose 'real' voice remains inaccessible.
Reenie
Colloquial, proverbial, blunt. Working-class Ontario speech patterns.
The novel's most direct voice — unmediated by education or social performance. Reenie says what others only think.
Narrator's Voice
Iris Chase Griffen: retrospective, unreliable, self-aware about her unreliability. She tells us she is constructing a narrative, not reporting truth — but the confession of construction is itself a rhetorical strategy. Iris controls the reader through apparent candor, revealing her deceptions strategically rather than comprehensively.
Tone Progression
Present-day frame (1990s)
Elegiac, sardonic, physically diminished
Iris narrates from the position of a dying woman reviewing her life with bitter clarity.
Childhood and family history (1920s-30s)
Nostalgic, sensory, increasingly ominous
Warmth and detail give way to gathering dread as the Depression and Richard Griffen approach.
Marriage and war (1930s-40s)
Cold, constrained, furious beneath the surface
Iris's narration mirrors her trapped life — controlled sentences containing controlled rage.
Novel-within-a-novel
Urgent, erotic, desperate
Present-tense immediacy creates an intimacy absent from the retrospective memoir.
Sakiel-Norn
Mythological, distant, allegorical
The fairy-tale register creates maximum distance from the realistic narratives — and maximum symbolic density.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale — similar unreliable female narrator, similar concern with how women's stories are appropriated and interpreted
- A.S. Byatt's Possession — another novel-within-a-novel exploring authorship, literary reputation, and the gap between public narrative and private truth
- Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient — contemporary Canadian novel with nested narratives, wartime setting, and fractured chronology
- Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire — another novel built around a text-within-a-text whose 'editor' reveals more than intended
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions