The Blind Assassin

Questions about truth are central to The Blind Assassin, in part because the novel is full of liars: Richard, Winifred, and Iris herself, who lies not only to her fellow characters but also to her readers. On the face of it, then, the plot of the novel seems geared toward separating reality from fiction and exposing the truth. As she draws nearer to her conclusion, for instance, Iris talks about the pleasures of watching other people "spill the beans," implying that in reading her story, we are waiting for the same payoff (448). And as promised, Iris's memoirdoes in fact end with a series of revelations: that Richard sexually abused Laura, that she herself wrote the novel-within-a-novel, and that Sabrina is Alex's granddaughter, for example.

On the whole, however, Atwood's novel makes it clear that there are no easy distinctions separating truth from falsehood or fantasy from reality. The structure of the novel alone blurs the lines between fact and fiction: the story of the blind assassin and the girl is also the story of the unnamed lovers, which is itself the story of Iris and Alex (but perhaps also, metaphorically, Laura and Alex). What's more, the title of Iris's novel is the same as the title of the novel we ourselves are reading, implying that our own reality is also part of this series of nested stories.