The Blind Assassin: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

In The Blind Assassin, the woman only has one photograph of the man: the photograph of the picnic. In it, she and the man are both smiling, and it looks almost as if the man is holding his hand out to protect her. The woman often looks at this image while she is alone. There is another hand in it, the hand of a figure who’s been cut off. The woman wonders how she could have been “so ignorant” in the past, but she also knows this ignorance was necessary to survive. The photograph is happy, but the story it tells isn’t. The story is one of “loss and regret and misery and yearning.” 

The Port Ticonderoga Herald and Banner features the obituary of Iris Chase Griffen, who died in May 1999 at the age of 83. Myra, who wrote the obituary, describes Iris as “a memorable lady” who died peacefully in her garden. It notes that Iris’s one surviving family member, Sabrina, recently returned from India to sort through Iris’s affairs, a task Myra will help with.

Sometime prior to this obituary, the elderly Iris sits on her back porch on a warm, wet spring day. She feels as if she is seeing the world completely clearly. Beside her is the manuscript that she’s been writing, which she plans to leave inside her trunk, waiting for Sabrina to return and find it. She has a fantasy about Sabrina’s return, imagining her arriving unexpectedly and knocking on Iris’s door. Iris will think that Sabrina is the most beautiful person she’s ever seen. Sabrina will address her as “Grandmother,” ending the estrangement between them. Iris will make Sabrina cocoa and tell her the whole story of their family and how Sabrina came to exist. Iris won’t ask Sabrina to love or forgive her—she only hopes that her granddaughter will listen.