Set in nineteenth-century Canada, Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace is partly presented by a first-person narrator who is a woman convicted of having murdered her employer. Grace Mark's narrative is evasive and unreliable concerning her involvement in the crime. This paper analyzes the array of narrative techniques employed by Atwood to make the identity of her protagonist multifaceted and ambiguous. It focuses on the role of autobiographical narrative in the construction of a sense of identity in order to show how Atwood's foregrounding of the unreliability of Grace's narrative questions the concept of a homogeneous self. In the case of Atwood, however, this does not really amount to a deconstructionist denial of the unified subject, but serves to express the author's feminist concerns as multi-layered female identity eludes the male attempts at unequivocal definitions. As can be shown, Alias Grace is highly self-reflexsive in its use of images (especially of images derived from quilting) for the narrative process and contains a great number of intertextual allusions. All these factors contribute to emphasizing the ambiguity of the novel's narrator-protagonist and to undermine notions of historical objectivity in what is Atwood's first historical novel.
