In the following excerpt, Rigney discusses the theme of discovering the self through descent and return in Atwood's Surfacing.

It is the life-impulse [Atwood] uncovers and venerates [in Surfacing] alone on the island peeling off her civilized skins. This is the impulse [she] uncovers in her poetry, honoring the claim-to-life of whatever lives. The narrator of Surfacing sees a heron killed for sport hanging in a tree and is as powerfully converted as Saint Eustace coming upon the stag with the cross between its antlers…. Her magnified understanding is not occupied with what the heron might stand for, or mean to humans, but wi...