70 pages • 2-hour read
The Blind Assassin
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Books 14–15 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 14 Summary
Iris explains that she is nearing the end of her narrative and asks "wolves" and "dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits" to give her strength to continue, even if her motives in seeking "justice" aren't totally pure (497).
Back on the day of the accident, Iris opens up Laura's notebooks one at a time. The first contains a Latin translation of a passage from the Aeneid, where the goddess Iris releases Dido from her sufferings via death. Others contain the photo of Laura and Alex at the picnic, a description Laura once wrote of Port Ticonderoga, and a list of made-up words the sisters had discovered in the attic after sheltering Alex. The last, however, contains a series of dates that correspond to Richard propositioning her for sex.
Iris conceals what she's learned until after Laura's funeral, and then leaves while Richard is gone on a business trip. She returns to Port Ticonderoga with Aimee, threatening to reveal everything if Richard doesn't agree to give her a small allowance to live on. Richard ultimately complies, but Iris also wants a "memorial of some kind," and decides to publish The Blind Assassin (508). The book renews speculation that Laura committed suicide, and an inquiry into BellaVista Clinic turns up "damaging" letters between Richard and the director (510). The scandal destroys Richard's political aspirations, and he shows up dead in the Water Nixie not long after. Winifred, blaming Iris for her brother's death, finds evidence that Iris has had affairs since leaving Richard and uses this information to have Iris declared an unfit guardian for Aimee.
Back in the present, Iris admits that Laura didn't write The Blind Assassin, but says she published it under her sister's name because Laura was her "collaborator" (513). Now at the end of her family history, she says she has realized that she has been writing it for Sabrina: "Since Laura is no longer who you thought she was, you're no longer who you think you are, either. That can be a shock, but it can also be a relief…[y]ou're free to reinvent yourself at will" (513).
Book 15 Summary
The epilogue to The Blind Assassin closely parallels the prologue, again describing the cropped photo of the picnic. The woman sees it as evidence of her blindness but, given the transience of the happiness captured in the photo, suggests that the painfulness of life necessitates a degree of ignorance.
Next, an obituary dated from 1999 announces Iris's death, briefly explaining her ties to Richard, Benjamin Chase, and "noted local authoress Laura Chase" (519). It also states that Sabrina Griffen has recently returned to Canada and plans to visit Port Ticonderoga to deal with her grandmother's estate.
The novel ends in the moments just prior to Iris's death, as she sits on her porch alongside the family history she has been writing:
[w]hen I'm done—when I've written the final page—I'll pull myself up out of this chair and make my way to the kitchen, and scrabble around for an elastic band or a piece of string or an old ribbon. I'll tie the papers up, then lift the lid of my steamer trunk and slide this bundle in on top of everything else" (520).
Iris then addresses Sabrina directly, saying that she daydreams about her coming to Iris's house and listening to her story. She admits, however, that she isn't sure what she hopes to get from Sabrina, and says that she will "leave [herself] in [Sabrina's] hands" (521).
Books 14–15 Analysis
The ending of The Blind Assassin, like the rest of Atwood's novel, is open to multiple interpretations. Certain aspects of the conclusion, for instance,tend to reinforce the idea that history is a cyclical and inescapable force; the epilogue to Iris's novel is an almost word-for-word restatement of its prologue, while the memoir closes with Laura and Richard's deaths, the same deaths mentioned in the obituaries at the beginning of The Blind Assassin. Structurally, in other words, the novel appears to end where it started.
Given all this, Iris's decision to send her memoir to Sabrina might seem counterintuitive; if anything, burdening her granddaughter with the family history would just seem to perpetuate it. Iris, however, suggests that the legacy will actually be freeing this time, because Sabrina's past is itself an unknown:
[y]our real grandfather was Alex Thomas, and as to who his own father was, well, the sky's the limit. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, saint, a score of countries of origin, a dozen cancelled maps, a hundred leveled villages—take your pick. Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will(513).
The ending of the novel, in other words, presents another twist on ideas of fate, memory, and knowledge, hinting that a certain degree of amnesia might actually help break destructive historical cycles.
Another ambiguity in these final sections concerns the novel's depiction of language. Although The Blind Assassin is in many ways a testament to the power of language to create reality, there is also a sense of hopelessness surrounding many of the passages that involve language. Iris, for instance, describes writing and speaking not primarily as forms of communication, but as a somewhat pathetic attempt to overcome our own mortality: "[w]e wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants…[a]t the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down" (95). Given that the novel depicts destruction as inevitable and relationships between people as(at best) fraught with miscommunications, this cynicism seems well justified. The novel ends, however, with Iris speaking in some sense from "beyond the grave"; the final chapter, told from her perspective, comes after her obituary. Perhaps, then, The Blind Assassin does ultimately suggest that language and narrative can transcend the "great leaden suffocating order of things" (433).
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