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Margaret Atwood says, " A great deal has been made, from time to time, of the search for 'the Canadian identity'; sometimes we are told that this item is simply something we have mislaid, like the car keys, might find down behind the sofa if we are only diligent enough, whereas at other times we have been told that the object in question doesn't really exist and we are pursuing a phantom. Sometimes we are told that although we don't have one of these 'identities', we ought to, because other countries do" (Atwood, Strange 9). One of the important dimensions of Canadian literature is the quest for Canadian identity and the writers engaged in this feat are often confronted with adverse remarks. These adverse remarks, Atwood admits are usually by some academics or newspaper columnists whose purpose is to characterize Canadian identity with insignificance or declare it as nonexistent like a phantom or illusion. Those academics or newspaper columnists deny Canada its identity when they say that, although Canada does not have any identity, it must have one because other countries have their own identities. But according to Atwood it is wrong to say that Canada does not have any identity. She says that the country has its identity which often appears in the forms of some images like snow, ghosts or monsters, disasters, wild unfriendly expanses in Canadian literature. Atwood says that those images, in Canadian literature, " .. .have been repeated so often and absorbed so fully that they are instanfiy recognized" (Atwood Strange 10). The images of snow, monster, disaster and wild unfriendly expanses which, describe the Canadian north or are solidly grounded on the region's various facts or historical events, are treated by several Canadian writers, but with variations, who are in quest of Canadian identity in their works. One of the important aspects of the quest is that it contextualises the above mentioned images in non natives' or native Canadians' reactions to them in the Canadian north or wilderness.
A vital notion of the Canadian north, finely etched in Canadian literature, is that it is wild and icy and traps in it the white settlers or non natives who have an antagonistic stance towards nature and causes terrible things to...