The Blind Assassin

Fate is one of the central themes in Atwood's novel, and it often takes the form of family legacy. The button factory, for instance, is less an inheritance than a burden to most of the novel's characters; Benjamin Chase's sons want no part in the family business, but Norval becomes enmeshed in it regardless, ultimately (and unsuccessfully) sacrificing Iris to Richard in a bid to keep it open. Even before her marriage, however, the button factory weighs heavily on Iris. As soon as it becomes clear that he will not have a son, Norval begins to coach Iris in how to run a business, much to her confusion:"He didn't look as if he was explaining, he looked as if he was apologizing. He wanted something from me, apart from an answer to his question. It was as if he wanted me to forgive him, to absolve him from some crime; but what had he done to me? Nothing I could think of" (102). Here, Norval Chase seems to realize that Chase Industries is likely to be a burden to Iris, but heis nevertheless powerless to do anything except hand it over to her.

Fate and family also go together in more oblique ways. Three generations of Chase women—Adelia, Liliana, and Laura—die in ways related to womanhood and sex. Although there is no causal connection linking these deaths (Adelia dies of some form of "gynecological" cancer, Liliana dies following a miscarriage, and Laura kills herself after repeated sexual assault), there is certainly a symbolic one (63). It is as if suffering and exploitation are themselves a legacy that the Chase women are destined to inherit, which in turn points to another way in which fate operates in the book: through gender and class relations.

A second theme that emerges in this section is the nature of truth, particularly as it relates to language. At the end of the novel, Iris claims that labeling Laura the author of The Blind Assassin is metaphoricallytrue, and implies that Laura—with her interest in "spiritual" truth—would agree (512). Given what we learn about Laura in Book Three, this seems unlikely on the face of it: one of Laura's defining traits is her tendency to take words absolutely literally. However, Laura is also intensely idealistic, to the point of being totally unconcerned with objective reality. Given all this, Laura's literalism may have less to do with an inability to recognize the everyday, figurative meaning of expressions and more to do with a tendency to ignore the conventional usage in favor of what she perceives as the words' "deeper" truth.

This becomes particularly evident in a scene that takes place shortly after Liliana's death. Iris is irritated by her sister's repeated insistence that their mother is in heaven, saying: "True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her" (97). Here, Laura's belief in the literal truth of the prayers corresponds to a belief in something beyond the physical world around her. Iris, by contrast, is more of a realist, and finds Laura's easy acceptance of metaphysics so grating that she pushes her off the ledge they're sitting on. The episode thus foreshadows the role that Iris will play in her sister's death, even as it also develops key characters and themes.