The emphasis throughout is on process and reconstruction, where ‘truth’ is only a matter of the teller’s perspective, as Offred often reminds us. Her narrative is a discontinuous one, with its frequent time shifts, short scenes, and its unfinished ending. One of the first things we notice is the way the story shifts abruptly from one scene to another and from present time to the past, so that the narrators present situation and her past history are only gradually revealed. Reading is an exercise of reconstruction as we piece together present details with fragments of remembered experience, revealed by flashbacks. At the beginning there are few flashbacks, for we, like the narrator, are trapped in present time. The first flashback occurs in Chapter 3 and there are brief references to Luke in Chapters 2 and 5.
“ it’s one of the things we fought for, said the Commanders Wife, and suddenly she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking down at her knuckled, diamond- studded hands, and I knew where I had seen her before.
The first time was on television, when I was eight or nine. It was when my mother was sleeping in, on Sunday mornings,”
However, it is in the ‘night’ sections that the flashback technique is most obvious and most sustained, for this is Offred’s ‘time out’ when she is free to wander back into her remembered past. It is here that we gain a sense of Offred as a powerful personal presence with a history.
It is Offred’s narrative voice transcribed into text, which situates her as an individual woman grounded in place and time, whose identity transcends that of her Handmaids role. Through the language she uses, rather than the events of the story she tells, Offred convinces us of her resistance to Gilead’s values. Offred’s outer life is very constricted and drained of emotion, but her inner life has a lyricism, which enable her to survive emotionally as well as physically in the stony soil of Gilead. There is a marked difference between the language she uses to record her muted everyday life, and the language of her real life of feeling and memory, which is expressed through a richly worked vocabulary of images. These register her entirely different perception of herself and her world from the one imposed by Gilead.
We come to understand Offred’s condition of double vision, for she continually sees and judges the present through her memories of the past. As she says in Chapter 35,
“You’ll have to forgive me. I am a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me”.
The narrative represents the complex ways that the memory works, where the present moment is never self-contained but pervaded by traces of other times and events.
Offred is not fixed in the past; indeed she is also writing of the present, and her recorded daily life is presented with scrupulous attention to realistic detail. She records the unexciting monotony of her daily life as a Handmaid, as well as it crises, both public and personal. There are the public meetings like the Birth Day, the Prayvaganza and the terrible Salvaging; there is of course the monthly Ceremony as a semi-public event; there are her own significant private events, like her secret meetings with the Commander, including their outing to Jezebel’s. However ambivalent her feelings for the Commander may be, Offred recognises that it is through these meetings in his study where she can talk and read that she is enabled to return to a lively sense of herself as an individual. Most crucial for her is her love affair with Nick, which has all the conventional features of a romantic love story and possibly even a happy ending. Yet in the circumstances it is the most unlikely plot that could have been devised, and Offred tells it with a kind of dazzled disbelief in its reality.
Offred as an individual Handmaid has no identity (she has no real name and she must dress the same as all the other handmaids in her red gown) apart from the fact that she is a Handmaid. However the fact that no one knows her real name is a source that she can draw both power and identity from and only tell it to whom she wants, such as Nick.
“ My name is Kate”
Apart from this, she has no real power as the Handmaids are lowest in the control of power in the woman world, behind the Wives and the Aunts who are both two separate groups. On a personal level Offred must resort to medial crime in order to gain her own power and self-dignity such as the incidences when she steals the butter to use as hand cream.
In conclusion Atwood uses the various narrative techniques to effectively present Offred’s struggle to control her own life. When Offred is depressed and seeming like giving up, which usually occurs at night when she has too much time to think, she flashbacks to remind herself of more pleasant memories of her daughter or Luke, for example, in the past. It is in these narrative techniques that we can truly understand Offred’s character with such parts as her double vision, her ability to mix past and present. As she has no power hersef, she must draw it from these psychological abilities.
Word count: 1,163
