Surfacing can be divided into three main sections. Provide a critical summary of all three.

It portrays the intense experience of the narrator, which has the impact of the immediacy. This immediacy of the experience is communicated through the use of present tense. However, the narrator alternates between the present and the past, and the change of tense from the present to the past is noticeable.

Part I consists of the first eight chapters. It presents the narrator as an alienated person. She is alienated not only from others, from her family who are referred to by her as “they”, but also from herself. She is depressed, disconnected and believes she is disintegrating. She feels that it is a “relief to be exempt from feeling.”