The Evil American in Surfacing Before traveling around Europe last summer, friends advised me to avoid being identified as American. Throughout Europe, the term American connotes arrogance and insensitivity to local culture. In line with the previous stereotype, the unnamed narrator's use of the term American in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing is used to describe individuals of any nationality who are devoid of empathy and therefore destructive. The narrator, however, uses the word in the context of her guilt over the abortion and subsequent emotional numbness. The narrator's insulting definition of the American as an unempathetic and destructive individual is largely attributable to the narrator's projection of his own feelings of emotional dysfunction and guilt. Let's consider an individual incapable of empathy. Such a person has the potential to be enormously destructive to his surroundings. Without the ability to identify with others, it becomes indifferent whether others feel pain or joy. The narrator quickly begins to define an American just as a psychopath. While the narrator is fishing in a canoe, two Americans and a local guide pull up in their motor boat proudly flying the Stars and Stripes back and forth, rocking the canoe. During the conversation in which one of the Americans is "as friendly as a shark," the other American throws his cigar into the water and threatens to take his business elsewhere (66). Of the Americans, the narrator comments, "if they don't find anything in a quarter of an hour they launch themselves screaming around the lake in their rigged boat, deafening the fish. They are those who catch more than they catch". they can eat and would do so with dynamite if they ended up in the middle of the paper. The people I spoke to were aware of how dangerous it is to blindly apply stereotypes and labels in Margaret Atwood Emerging, the narrator freely applies the American label to those who are incapable of empathy and destructive. Her use of the label, however, is largely an expression of the emotional numbness and guilt she feels as a result of her abortion. At the end of the novel, there is hope that the narrator may be able to reunite her his head and his body reconciling himself with the events and emotions that torment his past. Perhaps as the narrator heals herself, her conception of the term American will undergo its own healing process, allowing the word to shed the qualities of callousness and destructiveness that have always been the narrator's own. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Outcrop. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1972.