The narrator’s obsession with the heron causes a feeling of
“a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there”
(131). Her sense of complicity is suggestive of her inability to stand up to any outside force, no matter how threatened she feels. Her inability to defend herself against the trauma caused by witnessing the treatment of the dead heron
does not support Atwood’s vision of a self-confident, reassured Canadian identity
that can protect itself against the “huge aggressive neighbor to the south” (Survival 3). Atwood critiques the state of Canadian literature pre-1970, as it was “not a bundle of uplifting Pollyanna cheer [… it was] a somewhat dour concoction” (4). In order to subvert this dour state of affairs, however, the persistence of the narrator to face her issues with death is commendable. The narrator’s description of sticky blood sparks several new connotations concerning the image of the hanged heron.