Research Paper on:
Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood on Self Victimization

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
a space where they find themselves victims of society and/or victims of themselves. In Margaret Atwoods "Surfacing" and Mordecai Richlers "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" we are given two individuals  who experience numerous external struggles in their search for identity and meaning. But, at the same time, many of their struggles are internal, presenting us with characters who are victims  of their own selves. In the following paper we examine this theme in the novels. The paper examines each individually and then presents a discussion which compares and contrasts the  two approaches to the theme of victimization of self. Surfacing "This is a strange book, filled with the increasingly hard-to-understand ramblings of a woman who is drawing deep  within herself to find her most feral state and cleanse herself of all the poisons she feels society has infested in her" (Siciliano =&subject=&). Such a simple perspective clearly indicates  that this woman is one who essentially tortures herself in her attempt to find a way out, in her attempt to surface above it all. And, in the respect that  she is torturing herself we see that she is inadvertently a victim of her self, stressing herself with introspections and perspectives. This novel starts out simply enough, and then  "moves slowly, but surely into a plotline filled with many serious topics: abuse, rape, the inability to love, the immediate repercussions of the 70s womens movement, abortion, marriage, the subjective  nature of reality, the process of finding oneself" (Siciliano =&subject=&). These are all realities that often lead people to be their own worst enemies. When people constantly examine every single  condition in life they are putting themselves at risk, endangering their own position in the world and their own sanity, as this woman clearly does. And, in these respects she