From an Obscured Gaze to a Seeing Eye? Iris as Victim, Villain, and Avenger in the Role of Writer-as-Assassin in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

In the postmodern period, first-person-limited, unreliable, female narrators may have a greater difficulty in “seeing†and, thus, depicting their landscapes than previous eras’ storytellers. Iris (Chase) Griffen, narrator-protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin , spins a complicated, self-reflective text exploring her attempts at composing a world vision that consumes the novel’s larger part. Iris’s search for answers about her identity as well as that of other characters may leave readers in the lurch, waiting for their “story,†in Ross Chambers’s terms, as an agreed-upon product. Nonetheless, having amassed assorted textual materials, Iris stockpiles the ammunition she needs to do her “job†as a storyteller-assassin who creates and destroys, as characters suffer a fall. Assuming guises dependent on location, Iris enacts the conflicting roles of a victim, social product, villain, and blind assassin to assault her culture’s masculinist architectures that bar women’s points of views in opposition to what Henry James presents as the unending panoramas offered by his metaphorical “House of Fiction.†Iris’s struggle to construct her life story mirrors the difficulty many women face more broadly, in which they face competing, irreconcilable values. In the novel, Iris’s ability to play differing parts with equal aplomb compels readers to view her as a complex narrator, constructing and assassinating fellow characters to render her female descendants’ fates as open ended.