Surfacing: Important Quotes Explained

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I have to be more careful about my memories. I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them . . . .

The narrator makes this statement in Chapter 8, when she holes herself up in an outhouse, waiting for David and Joe to explain to Evans that they want to stay on the island. While hiding in the outhouse, the narrator remembers facets of her childhood and contrasts the time she spent on the island with the time she spent in the city. She decides she has always felt safer in the wilderness than in the city. She then retracts that notion once she remembers all of the times she felt scared on the island. The narrator begins to worry here that her memories are unwittingly changing, and this quotation points out the frightening notion that memories are subjective. She panics at this realization, worrying that if she changes her memories she will have no way of checking herself. She worries she will act irrationally by relying on information that is not accurate.

Though here the narrator worries about others’ opinions affecting her memory, it is actually the narrator’s own subconscious that corrupts her memory. This passage foreshadows the narrator’s later exposure of a repressed memory. She recants the memory of her wedding, replacing it with the memory of having an affair with her art professor and aborting their baby. Interestingly, the false memory contains multiple true facts lifted from other sources. For example, she remembers a fountain from the company town near the village, but inserts the fountain into the memory of her wedding. She remembers what her lover said to her after the abortion, but instead remembers him saying it after her wedding. She even goes on to create a new false memory just as she exposes the repressed one. She remembers her brother keeping frogs in jars and inserts that memory into her abortion, falsely claiming that the doctors gave her the fetus in a jar. The narrator’s memories change themselves to fit with her desires and emotions, effectively erasing her abortion. Atwood’s audience becomes subject to the same difficulty as the narrator, unwittingly relying on false information.

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