ABSTRACT
Atwood’s search for a unifying Canadian symbol is a famous driving force in the narrator’s journey into the Canadian wilderness in Surfacing. In Surfacing, the interior voyage of the unnamed narrator is conflated with the search for a meaningful national identity – one removed from misrepresentations and clichéd images of Canada. However, this quest does not entirely begin in 1972 with Surfacing and Survival as an earlier, unpublished novel, The Nature Hut (1966), displays strong signs of an awareness of the need for a fresh narrative of Canadian national identity. As with Surfacing, the novel presents another female protagonist charged with the hazardous task of asserting Canadian difference. With this in mind, this chapter will examine what is thought of by many as Atwood’s signature novel, Surfacing, and the formative text, The Nature Hut, with particular reference to Atwood’s expression of and commitment to, borrowing Benedict Anderson’s phrase, the fashioning of a Canadian “imagined community”.
