107 pages • 3 hours read
The Year of the Flood
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PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “The Garden”
The novel opens with a hymn called “The Garden,” which serves as the prologue. The song describes how God’s Garden used to be “the finest Garden / that ever has been seen” (2) until “greedy Spoilers” (2) destroyed it. As a result, all living things are buried under waves of sand, and the water turned into “slime and mire” (2). Yet the hymn’s closing lines are hopeful, asserting that nature can be restored when “the Gardeners arise” (2).
Prologue Analysis
The hymn, as well as other songs that appear in the novel, reflect the theology of a fictional religious group called God’s Gardeners. This environment-oriented group is concerned about the consequences of the human impact on nature.
The opening hymn consists of 10 two-line stanzas with feminine rhyme. In the hymn, as throughout the novel, Atwood capitalizes some nouns, such as “Garden,” “Creatures,” “Spoilers,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Birds,” “Gardeners,” and “Life” (2). The capitalization suggests that these nouns have added importance, and readers are expected to pay close attention to them. The majority of these nouns are nature-related, and only one, Spoilers, refers to people, especially corporations that continuously harm nature for their own benefit and enrichment.
The hymn also describes the so-called “Waterless Flood” as “waves of sand” (2), suggesting that this natural anomaly is what caused the destruction of plants and animals, and thus significantly changed life on Earth.
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By Margaret Atwood
