The blind killer

The Blind Assassin (English: The Blind Assassin , 2000) is a novel of the writer Margaret Atwood , who in the year 2000 with the Booker Prize was awarded. Time magazine ranks the novel among the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

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It tells of the growing up of the two industrial daughters Iris and Laura Chase in the Canadian province of Ontario before the Second World War. The daughters from wealthy families, who grow up shielded from the outside world, get caught up in a vortex of ominous events. The young, unworldly Laura falls in love with the communist agitator Alex Thomas, who is held responsible for setting fire to his father's factory. But also for the older sister Iris it is apparently a matter of course to give him shelter in their own house.

The father makes the fatal mistake of marrying his daughter Iris to his greatest economic rival, a hypocritical, unscrupulous, power-hungry man. For the daughters, despite their outwardly preserved wealth, things only go downhill: the death of their father, the ruin of their father's factory, a nightmarish marriage for Iris, Laura ends up in a clinic. Throughout the years there has been a secret sexual affair with Alex Thomas, who has gone underground. The sisters become estranged from each other, events take their course, Laura commits suicide.

As an old woman, the narrator reveals in retrospect the events that led to the broken family history. Her wish is to bring clarity to the only remaining granddaughter, without which the shadows of the past will never pass. That is her motivation for writing the novel of her life. Towards the end of her life it has become an urgent need to express the pain of her ominous fate. She longs for personal contact with her granddaughter, from whom she hopes to overcome the gloomy family history, perhaps a posthumous absolution , because the narrator also bears a responsibility for the course of her own life story - a painful insight from the old woman, she too does not leave the reader completely untouched.

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The novel is particularly characterized by the various narrative strands: The frame narrative covers the years 1998–1999. In the first person perspective , the elderly narrator flashes back on her life. The years up to the death of her sister Laura in 1945 are decisive for her life; accordingly, this period represents the internal narrative and at the same time the main plot. The years 1947–1997 are essentially not mentioned. What happened in them can only be understood by the reader through short sequences that run through the book (pp. 573–582, 632–637, 678–681).

The author uses a clever means of referring to the progress of the plot at an early stage by inserting a series of fictitious newspaper articles. They convey some facts and impressions that are essential for understanding what is happening. At the same time, with this stylistic device of fictional newspaper articles, a new narrative perspective is created that enables a concise narrative of several decades and makes a detailed description of the events later in the book superfluous.

In addition, there is the alternation of two narrative perspectives, which determines the entire book: In chapters with the same heading, which bear the title of the book ("The Blind Murderer"), an authorial narrator describes the secret love affair of a young woman with Alex Thomas, who because of his involvement in communist circles has to hide. This relationship exists between 1935 and 1939 and ends when Alex Thomas dies in World War II. The isolated character of the secret meetings and the changed narrative perspective (authorial narrator instead of first-person narrator) reinforce the character of an independent subplot, although it is inseparable from the main plot.

Another narrative level comes about through the science fiction story that the lover invents at the otherwise sexually influenced meetings. This fantasy story serves as a parable about power, violence, sex, brutality and ruthlessness. The parallels between this "narrative within the narrative" and the main plot of the novel are obvious. The novel thus contains a second classic internal narrative and one can speak of a nested structure.