We had planned to finish off our presentation today with a few rhetorical questions Atwood seems to be asking, with her ultimate point and message to the world made clearer:


To close off our presentation, we wanted to leave you with a few questions to take with you. We’re shown that Atwood is a member of the Canadian canon, but apart from personally contributing to the conversation about Canadian identity and what truly constitutes Canadian literature, all of Atwood’s novels contribute to other conversations about the nature of the world and human nature.

In the Year of the Flood, Atwood is asking where our society is headed. Where do we want it to go? What are we doing to ensure that we’re headed in a direction we want to follow? I think few of us yearn for the totalitarian state with an utterly destroyed natural world depicted in the novel, and yet it is all too easy to see how we are headed in that direction. Atwood is goading us to have that conversation, and for once to define our own future instead of barreling along blinding.



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