Reading The Blind Assassin: How to Actually Get Through It
The book is structured as a set of nested narratives, which means it demands attention in a way most novels don't. There are three separate threads running at once: Laura Chase's first-person account of her childhood, Iris Chase Griffen's retrospective memoir, and the pulpy science fiction serial called "The Blind Assassin" that appears as a text-within-a-text. The first time I worked through it, I spent two weeks convinced the sci-fi serial was completely unrelated filler. It isn't. But getting past that initial confusion takes a specific approach. The core method for reading this successfully is to stop trying to track chronology and start tracking voice instead. Each section is signed by a different narrator with a distinct vocabulary. Laura's sections are immediate and sensory, Iris's are analytical and self-justifying, and the sci-fi serial is deliberately cheap and melodramatic. When you read it straight through in publication order, you'll miss the structural joke Atwood is playing. I learned that after going back and color-coding passages by narrator, which took about an afternoon and cut my actual comprehension time down to roughly half what it was the first pass. Here's what happens in practice when you actually read it properly: the science fiction serial isn't just a device. It's a parallel plot that mirrors the real events of the Chase family story. The characters in the serial correspond to Laura, Iris, and Alex Bassett, but shifted into archetypal roles. If you've ever tried to summarize the book for someone who hasn't read it, you'll immediately run into the problem that the serial's ending directly contradicts the memoir's version of events. That contradiction is the whole point of the novel. Beginners tend to pick a side and declare one narrator unreliable. Neither narrator can be trusted completely, and the book is structured so that you can't determine which version is factually correct. That's not a flaw in the book, it's the intended reading experience.
One thing that catches people off guard is the timeline. Iris's memoir frames the entire book, but she's writing decades later about events that happened when she was young. She edits her own memory in real time as she writes. The sci-fi serial was published in a magazine in the 1940s, but it was written by Alex Bassett, which means its content was shaped before his death but after the events it describes. Laura's sections sit outside the framing entirely. If you're trying to build a timeline for an essay or discussion group, you need three separate timelines that overlap in ways that don't resolve cleanly. I built a spreadsheet for this, and even with the spreadsheet, there are gaps the text intentionally leaves open. Don't try to close them. The prose itself is dense in a way that slows most readers down. Atwood writes long compound sentences that contain embedded clauses, ironic asides, and shifts in tone within a single paragraph. This isn't decoration. The syntactic complexity mirrors the thematic complexity. Someone reading at an average speed will finish a chapter in twenty minutes and absorb maybe half of what's actually on the page. Going slower, rereading the final pages of each section, adds roughly thirty percent to your total reading time but increases retention substantially. There's no shortcut around this. Another counter-intuitive thing: the romance plot is almost entirely secondary. People talk about it like a love triangle, but the novel is really about the manipulation of narrative authority. Alex Bassett writes the sci-fi serial partly to control how the story of Laura and Iris gets told. Iris writes her memoir partly to reclaim that authority. Laura's sections are the only ones that resist framing entirely, which is why they feel the most authentic to most readers, even though they're also the most emotionally opaque. This distinction matters if you're analyzing the book for a class or a book club, because a lot of surface-level discussions mistake the emotional plot for the actual argument of the novel.
There are real limitations to what this approach yields. The book will frustrate readers who want resolution, and it denies them deliberately. The ending doesn't tie things up, it recontextualizes everything that came before and then stops. If you're looking for closure or a clear moral takeaway, this structure actively works against you. Some readers find the sci-fi serial sections tedious even on a second read, and there's no fixing that. The pacing of those interludes is deliberately jarring, and the tonal shift from literary fiction to pulp is the point. You can either accept the friction or skip ahead, but skipping means missing the structural parallel I mentioned earlier. I'd recommend reading it straight through once without stopping to analyze, then doing a second pass where you note which narrator owns each section and what that narrator has at stake in telling the story that way. That second pass usually takes about four or five hours for the full text, depending on your reading speed. The payoff is noticeable by the third chapter of the second read, when the nested structure starts revealing its mechanics instead of just confusing you.
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