Surfacing Chapter 19 Summary

  • After dinner, Anna offered to do the dishes. Meanwhile, the narrator went in search of the gift she was sure her mother had left for her. She came to the conclusion that the gift was in the scrapbooks.
  • While that was going on, a boat arrived down at the dock. Joe, Anna, and David talked to the four men who had arrived (two official-looking gentlemen, plus men she believed to be Claude and Paul).
  • David then ran up to the cabin to tell the narrator that some American dudes had found her father's body in the lake. Paul had identified it.
  • The narrator seemed to be in denial about the news, thinking that David was trying to trick her to be mean. In order to avoid giving them the "satisfaction" of seeing her riled, she declined David's suggestion that she talk to the men. She told David to tell Paul she would come see him the next day to make arrangements for her father's burial.
  • Then she went into the other room and resumed looking at the scrapbook. She was sure that her mother's gift was there. A picture, one she had made as a child, fell out, which she supposed to be the "gift."
  • Tense Shift Alert (again): This brings us back up to the narrator's "present," where she is sitting in her room listening to the others in the next room. She continues from here using the present tense. (Let's hope she finds a tense she likes and sticks with it.)