Illusion and Identity in Atwood’s Essay Example for Free

Illusion and individuality in Atwoods EssayIdentity in Atwoods This is a Photograph of Me In her poem This is a Photograph of Me, agent Margaret Atwood uses imagery and contrast to explore issues of fast one versus reality as well as identity. The poem is split into two halves. The first half contains descriptive words about scenery and natural objects, and the turn half, surrounded by parentheses, begins with the unnerving surprise that the narrator is dead.The poem opens with a description of a picture that at first seems blurry exclusively slowly comes into focus, like a photograph slowly developing, that even resembles a written poem itself (blurred lines and grey flecks/blended with the paper. ) The second and third stanzas go on to describe objects in the picture, including a small frame house, a lake, and some low hills. The first half has a reminiscent and descriptive tone, falsely leading the reader on with serenity.But even here, there is a shroud of mystery, wi th a description not just of a branch, but of a thing that is like a branch, and the house is halfway up/ what ought to be a gentle slope, not halfway up a gentle slope. What could this mean? The calm albeit mysterious rest of the first half ends with the fourth stanzas jarring declaration, etymon with an opening parenthesis, that the photograph the narrator is describing was taken/ the day by and by she dr stimulateed. The pace of the poem after this revelation seems frantic, searching for the narrator in the lake, which was in the first half described as being in the background and now in the essence/ of the picture. The narrator tells the reader that what can be seen is distorted and one must look intently, playing with the themes of illusion and identity. Perhaps the ambiguity of the poem and the exploration of illusion and identity are hinting at a feminist perspective that a womans true spirit is overcast by a male-dominated society.Or perhaps the poems focus is eluding t o a more universal human search for identity, a with a narrator who is unsure and obscured, but just under the surface, about to break out previously dead but now reborn, to find a new path. Or perhaps the author is talking about poetry or literature itself and the authors hidden intentions lurking in the work. As noted earlier, the description of the photograph at the beginning resembles a description of a poem blurred lines and grey flecks/ blended with the paper, like lines of writing and the letters comprising words.The author dies with the birth of her poem, when the piece lives on its own but the author is still there, somewhere, her intentions a key part of the text. The photograph in the poem, in the first half, is described as smeared and blurred and in the second half there is still distortion. So instead of disclosing the narrators story and identity, no resolution is apparent. On the contrary, the photograph creates illusion and obscures identity. The reader is left w ing with uncertainty, just like the blurred and distorted photograph of the poem.