The Blind Assassin

Blindness is probably the most conspicuous motif in the novel: it provides the title for both Atwood's novel and the novel-within-a-novel, and is a major topic in the story set on Zycron. Literal blindness also figures prominently in the frame narrative: Norval Chase, for instance, loses an eye in World War I. Iris's vision, meanwhile, begins to deteriorate before she has her final meeting with Laura, leading her to speculate that the "fuzzy light around Laura" she saw that day could have been an "optical flaw" (483). Iris's "blindness" in this scene is symbolically significant given the unwitting role she plays in Laura's death. In fact, Iris repeatedly uses blindness as a metaphor for the problem of human action: because we cannot foresee the consequences of our decisions, and because we are so often acting on inaccurate or incomplete information to begin with, we are all in some sense living our lives blindly. This can have lethal consequences, which is where the figure of the blind assassin in particular enters in. Iris, for instance, describes her choice to enter into a relationship with Alex—a choice that contributes to Laura's suicide—as "blind but sure-footed" (321).