What is the main conflict in Surfacing by Margaret Atwood?

Atwood separates the narrator’s experiences into three parts. The reader learns about the narrator as she learns about herself. In the first part, Atwood’s narrator explores her views on poverty, rural and city life in Canada, the Canadian political life in the early 1970’s, and the American conflict in Vietnam, in addition to considering her life’s choices and changes. The narrator’s voice strengthens as the novel progresses, and in the second part of the novel, as she discovers more about her past, her parents, and her family life, she also discovers personal values she did not know she had. In the novel’s final section, the narrator comes into a self-knowledge that not only incorporates the knowledge of her past and her family but also her own sense of self-worth and strength.