David --

Anna --

Joe

Paul & Madame--

the narrator's parents

the 'Americans'

本書呈現女主角（插畫藝術家）回到家鄉（魁北克北部的小島）尋找父親並面對過去的經驗﹒這段旅程讓她面對過去（包括兒時回憶、她所耿耿於懷的墮胎經驗）和死亡，面對她身旁複雜的人際關係，也面對人類對自然的破壞﹒起先，她父親是活是死造成懸疑，但是，漸漸地讀者發現敘述者的破碎心靈才是最需要拯救的﹒
她到底有沒有結婚？她能找到父親嗎？她應該棄絕人類，回歸自然嗎？
最後，她能夠由這些埋在人心和自然深處的糾葛中浮出水面嗎？

* 以下情節摘要會特別標示三種重點：1)女性的處境；2) 自然被破壞；3)女主角面對過去的心情糾葛.

The beginning of a quest (also homecoming), the chapter starts with:

--mixed metaphors: "I can't believe I'm on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hire"(p. 3). Here the disease refers to both the natural disease of the birches and human exploitation of nature.

-- sense of alienation: 1) arriving at her hometown, which she calls: "my home ground, foreign territory" (7); 2) resisting telling the story: the narrator refers to her parents, herself, and her brother "as if they were somebody else's family"; also she has to "keep [her]self from telling that story" (10).

They decide to stay longer; she stays away from Evan, goes swimming--> remembers her quitting Sunday school, her experience of diving.

-- the narrator's duplicity: She says "I always felt safe here," and then her "own voice" speaking aloud, "That's a lie"; and, thinking "hard about it, considering it," she agrees that "it is a lie." "I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own" (70).

". . . finally being in the air is more painful than being in the water and I bend and push myself reluctantly into the lake."

Begins to search and dive into the lake; past tense. (See a note on The Use of Language and Tenses in Surfacing.)

--> remembers her experience in the surgery room; refers to her 'husband' as 'he.'

Joe's proposal; remembers her 'wedding'; looks at her scrapbook.

expresses her fear of death; sees the dead heron.

--David: Anna reveals how he is a womanizer(98-99).

the 'toilet' in nature; Anna talks about her 'makeup' (123); meets the Americans;

--David: wants Anna to 'look like a young chick' (123).

the 'Americans' turn out to be from Toronto p. 129

"The trouble some people have being German," she says in reference to the Nazi atrocities, "I have being human" (p. 131)

Dives into the lake and sees 'it' -- her father's corpse? Or the aborted foetus?

Then she starts to face the real past: " It wasn't a wedding, there were no pigeons, the post office and the lawn were in another part of the city where I went for stamps" (145);

-- "death . . . inside me," that she has layered "over, a cyst, a tumour, black pearl" (145);

Some people comes to report the finding of her father; she behaves calmly, which for the other three is abnormal.

'. . . nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.'

sees 'Father.'