Surfacing: A Summary Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing tells the story of a young Canadian woman’s search for her missing father and finding a new sense of herself along the way. The author uses imagery to portray the narrator’s feelings of enclosure that she struggles with upon returning to her childhood home and her subsequent release of those feelings at the end at the end of the novel. In chapter 2 we learn that the narrator’s life spent in the bush with her family was largely isolated. Her parents took pains to keep the outside world far away. Describing the outside world as “flecked gray newsreels [she] ne