Margaret Atwood's novels are photographs of her characters' lives: while words only ever
describe her protagonists blurred visions of their pasts their 'true' stories are told in
subtexts which run parallel or even contrary to the main story line and which depict the unseen
the buried the 'untrue'. Replete with intertextual references her fiction illuminates that
and why [w]hat isnt there has a presence like the absence of light (The Blind Assassin). She
plays with our conventional modes of perception to make us aware of the way we frame reality in
our minds. In her book Andrea Strolz discusses the interrelation between metafictional and
intertextual features in two of Atwood's novels that share many similarities even though
written in different decades. She examines how Atwood weaves intertextual references into her
fiction how she facilitates a reader's recognition of the intertexts and she shows that
Atwood's narrator-prota-gonists also reflect on our age as oneof intertextuality.
