Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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Margaret Atwood's

The Blind Assassin

(2000), winner of the Booker Prize, is a Canadian postmodern metafiction that is deliberately deceptive. Structured like nesting Russian dolls, it is a novel-within-a novel within another novel, blending three narratives interspersed with newspaper clippings, a letter, and society announcements. The first narrative is a self-reflexive memoir of Iris Chase's life in Port Ticonderoga and Toronto, Canada, predominantly in the 19030s and 40s, including her writing of all three narratives. In the novel's present, Iris is 82 and living simultaneously in three time periods, the past of the two narratives's events, the present of the writing, and the future of the science fiction.

The second narrative, also called “The Blind Assassin”, is a novel published

2066 words

Citation: Wilson, Sharon. "The Blind Assassin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 March 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1439, accessed 28 March 2024.]

1439 The Blind Assassin 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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