Atwood has explained that in her third novel she set out to write "a kind of antithesis to Surfacing (1972), which is very tight and everything in it fits and there's not anything that's out of place ... . In Lady Oracle, I set out to write a book that was all tangents."
Written in the first person, the novel operates as a metafictional novel-within-a-novel. The five-part narrative begins at the end by placing the protagonist in Italy in the aftermath of her supposed death; its middle three sections provide in loose flashback a chronological history of the events in Joan's life that have brought her to this impasse. This episodic autobiography is peppered with extravagant coincidences which, together with Joan's ironic stance toward her tale, create the comic tone.....
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