Preview

What Are Our Commonsense Explanations Of Cat's Eye By Margaret Atwood

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1657 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Are Our Commonsense Explanations Of Cat's Eye By Margaret Atwood
"Our commonsense explanations of the world and ourselves are problematised by Atwood through her novel. Nothing is quite as it seems, when we look at anything (in a mirror, in the past, at others) it is refracted as if through water." Discuss the ideas and issues in the novel in relation to this statement, paying particular attention to the techniques and narrative elements used to show this.

Our commonsense explanations of the world are based on the absolutes in our lives. Ways of seeing have been socially constructed embedded with values and attitudes that influence our behaviour and view of the world and ourselves. Reality cannot be captured and is interpreted differently by every individual as if refracted through water. Cat 's Eye is
…show more content…

The novel questions whether 'lives ', 'stories ' or autobiographical narratives can ever be accurate. A novel that presents a straightforward linear narrative that moves through events sequentially and constructs a complete set of ideas about life that seem unproblematic. It accepts that our experience of life, our thoughts and feeling, motivations, movement through time - our very representation in a literary text, can be captured accurately. It implies order, coherence, unity and stability; a rational basis for our actions and thoughts thus presenting a conservative worldview. The structure of Cat 's Eye serves as a critique of this unproblematic view of the world. The novel constantly shifts between past and present and her narration as a young Elaine and an old Elaine. This shifting represents Elaine 's life, as she feels it is barley comprehensible. Because the story is written in first person, its only presents one version of reality- Elaine 's version. This leads us to question Elaine 's version and its accuracy. Atwood 's purpose behind this is to bring to light the complexity of character in Elaine, and highlight her struggle in coming to terms with her own identity. This challenge on the common qualities of autobiographical …show more content…

Our lives operate around security (especially of ourselves) and we generate and understanding and connect ourselves to the world through various versions of reality that we reinforce to become believed 'absolutes ' upon which we base our lives Without the 'fixed reality ' we create for ourselves and the absolutes that structure our lives, our sense of purpose, and meaning diminishes. Distress is brought upon us through Cat 's Eye because Atwood critiques our quest for identity as she suggests that we will never 'know ourselves ' and will never have a fixed identity. It is therefore the reader 's choice on weather to comprehend the notions Atwood is proffering. Atwood uses varied techniques and narrative elements such as imagery, symbolism, and the narrative point of view to allude her beliefs. Through the particular employment of these techniques Atwood strengthens her case to the reader and positions them to support her indited criticisms of a knowable identity, and a fixed reality and truth. Cats Eye challenges the measurable, and the way we qualify things as knowable and existing and a

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    By using a logical yet strong language for his description the author presents his characters more closely to the reader in a way that they relate to the real picture being grasped by the reader. For instance; Louisa Mae Cardinal, being the principal subject of the novel is depicted as a girl who was ever curious, strong in spirit and engaging. These attributes are innately ascribed to her father whom she seems to be a replica of. Consider the fact that, Louise had an innate believe that, the land held secrets that…

    • 623 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

     Literary Reflection - you will be completing a literary analysis on some aspects of the novel. For these responses you will need to cite textual evidence (quotes/passages from the novel) and analyze how these quotes prove your claim.…

    • 713 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, focuses on a woman named Janie Crawford and her adventure for love and her struggle for independence. Since both of Janie’s parents were not in her life, she is forced to live with her grandmother. One day, Janie meets a boy and kisses him; this single action dictates where the rest of her life…

    • 289 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    An unreliable perspective is used through the text, employing a narrative voice which results in ambiguity, leading the reader to think about the reality of the novel.…

    • 874 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    During our days of lives we live through the cycle of perspectives. The significance of an individual's perspective changes by influences from people around and the change of age. We would create fantasy worlds in which they live when life does not seem to go their way. In order to escape from reality is sometimes necessary as it enables ones creativity to grow and dreams to go on, but when a person escapes too much from reality they may start to lose track of their lives and collapse and break down at the end. From two different perspectives of characters, the author Margaret Lawrence displays her views in the story "Horses of the Night". We are influenced by the things people do around you and how we learn from them then perspective will be made by the experiences and the choices we will be making.…

    • 1008 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Oryx and Crake

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Through the juxtaposition of the main characters in the novel, Jimmy and Crake, we see a conflict ensue between the use of science to satisfy human needs, represented by Crake, and the associated problem of reality, represented by Jimmy. Through Jimmy, Atwood indirectly argues that scientific advancement has created a world of false reality, and could eventually lead to society’s failure by its own hand. Jimmy’s underlying focus on the arts led him to believe that the society in which he…

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Symbolism In Cat's Eye

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages

    There’s large amounts of symbolism in the story, especially in the latter half. To begin, the title of the story Cat’s Eye represents the marble that Elaine was fond of in her childhood. She stated that the marble was something she could protect herself with, and it represented her lost childhood because as time carries on, she didn’t care much for the marble and forgot about it completely till she discovered it much later on in her life. It symbolized her innocence and who she was, and when she lost the marble, she lost that part of herself as well. Later on, Elaine’s paintings have been revealed to the public, and it’s been made clear what those paintings represent. She talks about several paintings she made, describing them all in detail,…

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    perceive the novel in the rational of an eleven-year-old girl. One short, simple sentence is followed by another , relating each in an easy flow of thoughts. Gibbons allows this stream of thoughts to again emphasize the childish perception of life's greatest tragedies. For example, Gibbons uses the simple diction and stream of consciousness as Ellen searches herself for the true person she is. Gibbons uses this to show the reader how Ellen is an average girl who enjoys all of the things normal children relish and to contrast the naive lucidity of the sentences to the depth of the conceptions which Ellen has such a simplistic way of explaining.…

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    6) “Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the detail reveals. Like the symbolic imagination, this is a function of being able to distance oneself from the story, to look beyond the purely affective level of plot, drama, characters. Experience has proved to them that life and books fall into similar patterns. Nor is this skill exclusive to English professors.” pg.4…

    • 588 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Have you experienced the complete opposite of a love letter? Well, the novel Cat’s Cradle is just that, addressed to American society, and signed by author Kurt Vonnegut, In the novel, Jonah, the narrator, encounter’s multiple Americans on his trip to the island of San Lorenzo whom each have stories that are shared with Jonah, a working journalist. In this novel, Vonnegut showcases absurd characteristics, that are common among Americans, in order to express his opinion that American society is simply awful. He accomplishes this through the use of motivation, dialogue, and episodes.…

    • 1264 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The best aspect of Atwood's narrative is her use of description and imagery. Every detail is delivered in a crisp, clean depiction that includes everything from color and size, to the materials it is made of and the significance behind it. Her use of imagery creates a world so sensuous as to be physically impossible. Everything is delivered; the texture, the taste, the scent. The reader is released into a world solely made up of touch, feel, taste, smell, and sound.…

    • 307 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    ”Rat Song” is a poem written by Margaret Atwood and is part of Selected Poems from 1976. What is interesting about the poem is that it is written from the point of view of a rat. And by looking through the eyes of a rat (which many people see as a primitive and inferior animal) the poem shows how judgemental, hateful, hypocritical and “unnatural” the human race is. The poem furthermore advocates that humans are a much greater parasite than the rats they are so desperately trying to get rid of.…

    • 1117 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Atonement’s chief narrative feature is McEwan’s use of an embedded author—Briony Tallis—whose text is nearly coterminous with the novel itself. This technique is of course not a new one: Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling are both framed as the written accounts of their protagonists. McEwan’s trick in Atonement, though, is presumably that we are to be ignorant of the presence of this embedded author until very close to the end of the book. The chief effect of this is that we are forced to retroactively reconsider our epistemological position vis-à-vis the novel’s characters and its events, a reconsideration in which, I would like to argue, focalizations which we would (or should) have thought reliable become unreliable, and in which our acceptance of narrative as an entry into non-authorial points of view becomes undermined. That is, the novel implicitly asks whether—if because of the circumstances surrounding Briony’s authoring of these events, we cannot trust her technique of shifting focalization—we can take stock in any narrative in which point of view or focalization is different from that of the narrator (or, even, that of the author).…

    • 1010 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    2. Does Atwood’s framework of two intersecting narratives work, or does the reader find the short sections and constant change confusing and/or distracting? Explain why or why not you like the construction of the novel?…

    • 876 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    How to study hard

    • 383 Words
    • 1 Page

    entral to the understanding of the theme of this short story is the point of view selected by the author. This masterful dystopian short story is used a lot in English teaching to give an excellent example of 1st person narration, where a character is telling you the story directly, and you can only see the action through their eyes, contrasted with an omniscient narrator who is god-like and all-seeing and can tell the reader what every character is thinking and feeling. This form of limited narration is used to great effect by the author as we literally go on the journey with John, seeing and feeling what he sees and feels, and we gradually piece together like a jigsaw puzzle what is going on, where we are and what has happened.…

    • 383 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays

Related Topics