Burying and Misdirection in The Blind Assassin

The chapters in this first part of the book consider Atwood’s approach to detective fiction writing, and specifically the ways in which reader attention is linguistically manipulated and misdirected through stylistic cues in her texts. Misdirection is the ‘genre-typical set of techniques through which the crime fiction reader is very often deliberately misled away from the precise nature of the circumstances surrounding the crime the fiction features’ (Gregoriou, Narrative retellings: stylistic approaches, Bloomsbury, London, 2021, p. 93). ‘Burying’, or ‘backgrounding’, is one of the attentional strategies through which writers might mislead audiences (Emmott and Alexander, Foregrounding, burying and plot construction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014). Through analysis of a sample of 100 reader reviews and of extracts from across all levels of The Blind Assassin (Atwood, The blind assassin, Bloomsbury, London, 2000), this chapter examines the novel’s stylistic techniques of misdirection and the complex interplay between foregrounding and burying in concealing, and revealing, key details of the whodunit mystery.