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Margaret Atwood's Surfacing is an intensely symbolic novel about an artist whose weekend trip home to search for her missing father turns into a journey of self discovery. The main character in the story is also the narrator and is not given a name probably bec ....

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.... from everyone around her. This feeling of alienation is like being confined in a jar. In the novel, there are several references to jars, bottles and tin cans. These items represent methods of containing or imprisoning life : "I put the worms in a can and some dirt for them." They also represent the narrator's own emotional life which has been put into jars preventing her from being able to feel. The narrator knows that she has feelings, but the trauma of having an abortion has caused her to become extremely desensitized. It can be deduced that the narrator has always felt trapped in places she did not want to be. On page 58, she says that Ann ....