Do you fear isolation when you're at school? Would you want to fit into a group and make yourself look like you have friends and feel less lonely?
When you meet a talented teacher, knowing that he has a family and a lover, will you be with him?
When you no longer feel the love between your partners in marriage, will you choose to divorce?
……
Did the above questions pique your curiosity? So, let's take a look at how Elaine, the heroine of Atwood's "Cat's Eye", the queen of literature of Cana, chosen.
Once because of the slogan on the cover of "Cat's Eye", "As long as you fight back ruthlessly, you can break free from false friendship", I thought it was just a novel about false friendship. However, after reading this book, I found that I was small, which is obviously telling the wonderful story of the heroine Elaine's half of her life!
"Time is not a line, but a dimension, the same as the dimension of space." This sentence at the beginning of the novel fascinated me deeply. Because of his solo exhibition, half a hundred Elaine returned to his hometown of Toronto from the West Coast. Back to the city where she had spent her youth, to the city where she had not had good memories. The content of the novel alternates between reality and memory, but it does not feel messy at all. That's one of my favorite points.
At the age of eight, the Elaine family moved to Toronto because of their father's work. Elaine actively befriends Cordelia, Grace, Carol and others, but she does not gain real friendships. Two other events happened during this period that cast a serious shadow on Elaine. One is in the garden of Cordelia's house, they let Elaine play the decapitated Sugmali I in the name of the game, burying Elaine in the hole. When Elaine was covered with wooden planks, it was pitch black, and she could no longer hear Cordelia, she realized that this was not a game and that she had been betrayed.
One snowy day in mid-March, Cordelia threw Elaine's hat down the valley and ordered Elaine to pick it up. However, when Elaine fell into the frozen stream while picking up her hat, they not only did not help Elaine get out of trouble, but also disappeared. Think about what a horrible thing this is. In March, the snow and ice began to melt, and Elaine, who fell into the thin ice and piercing stream, was desperate.
Even though these two terrible things happened, Elaine still didn't tell anyone about what the Cordelia did, but she began to say goodbye to her former self and no longer continued to force the Cordelia circle. No matter what stage of life we are in, we must find our own place, no matter who is ridiculed, we will not put it in our hearts.
"Cat's Eye" uses different perspectives of time and space and uses seemingly ordinary but profound brushstrokes to outline the story of Elaine's half-life.