87 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Felix is the main character of Hag-Seed. Though the novel is narrated in the third person, Felix’s feelings and actions are the center of the narrative voice. Felix is an eccentric artistic director of a prestigious Shakespearean festival, but his life is turned upside down when he loses first his wife and daughter (to two separate tragic illnesses) and then his job (when a former friend and colleague, Tony, fires him and takes over his role). Felix spends the next 12 years largely secluded from society, nursing hallucinations of his dead daughter. He takes a job teaching Shakespeare at a prison, where he builds a reputation for developing literacy through Shakespeare. This enables him to enact his revenge upon Tony.
Felix is an unreliable narrator; at times he is clear about his bad intentions and deep resentments, while at other times he is in denial about his own wrongdoings. Felix creates a prison out of his own mind and finds a blueprint for his inner conflict in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He even changes his name from Felix Phillips to Felix Duke, a direct homage to the former Duke of Milan, Prospero. Felix models himself on Prospero, the vengeful sorcerer who also imprisons himself psychologically.
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By Margaret Atwood