There is a critical debate as to whether Margaret Atwood's Surfacing is a modern or post-modern novel, and the proponents of these two differing schools of thought offer two contradictory readings of the novel. However, this novel lives on the line between the two literary movements, with one foot anchored firmly in modernism and the other in post-modernism. It partakes of both the modern and post-modern characteristics of form, but it is neither a strictly modern or post-modern novel. Its form demands that Surfacing be read as both.
