Interspersed among these three narratives are fragments of a fourth, "public" narrative: newspaper and magazine stories of Toronto society in the 1930s and 1940s. On some distant planet a society believes that its welfare depends upon rituals in which girls are made human sacrifices, killed annually by former slaves whose painstaking work on fine carpets had made them blind. The man – some kind of political subversive – is on the run, while the woman has reason to want the relationship to remain secret.ĭuring their meetings we get fragments of a third narrative, a kind of science fiction fable that the man tells the woman. Two unnamed lovers pursue a surreptitious affair. Alternating with sections of her narrative are chapters from a story entitled The Blind Assassin, told in the present tense. The daughter of a well-intentioned Canadian businessman, her fate has been sealed by her marriage to her father's business rival, Richard Griffen, an arrangement calculated to rescue the family's failing fortunes. But how do they connect? The encompassing narrative, which begins and ends the novel, is told by Iris Griffen, now in her 80s, who looks back to her early life, and in particular to her teens and young adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s. It is made up of four narratives, interleaved with each other. T he very construction of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is puzzle-like.
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