The Handmaid's Tale - The narrator says of her tale, 'I'm sorry it's like fragments, like a body caught in crossfire and pulled apart by force'. How appropriate a description of the structure of the novel do you consider this?

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Dec 2003

Miss. Slocombe

AS English Literature Assignment 2.

The Handmaid’s Tale

The narrator says of her tale,

‘I’m sorry it’s like fragments, like a body caught in crossfire and pulled apart by force’.

How appropriate a description of the structure of the novel do you consider this?

Offred narrates her story in a rather disjointed, fragmented style.  Some parts of it are flashbacks of her life before the rise of Gilead.  Some parts are vignettes from her training as a Handmaid at the Red Centre, in which she and her friend Moira are subjected to the cruelty of the Aunts.  Other descriptions are described as present tense.  Offred appears in many ways as a sympathetic narrator, an every woman, who, in the pre-Gilead world of the contemporary United States, was an ordinary, sensual woman, with a college degree, a husband, a daughter and a job in a library.  She lost all those blessings as a result of the coup, and is now in a terrible, terrifying bind, a Handmaid in a powerful and repressive dystopia.

As she narrates about her life, in Gilead and the time before, she presents herself appealingly.  She shows resistance to the current regime.  She wishes to establish in Gilead two feelings rigorously suppressed: she wishes to talk and she hungers to ‘commit the act of touch’ (2:14).

Her frequent juxtaposing of her past and preset creates a powerful sense of, not only loss, but also a feeling of great longing for her past life.  As she recounts episodes that occur in the regime i.e. her recent past, she also looks back fondly to her life pre-Gilead.  She remembers the control she felt when she had family and friends.  She looks back with longing and love for her husband Luke and her daughter, reminisces about her friend Moira and thinks of her mother.

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Her story is told in a stream of conscious style, with memories and thought cutting into the relating of events.  Her voice is educated and sometimes funny, but she is a fallible narrator, as her story is so isolated.  The historical notes at the end accentuate this fallibility as the authenticity of her story is questioned.  She also tells her story in the present tense, which is near enough impossible as it would not have been possible for her to record this at the time that she describes (the regime did not permit any sort of communication).  

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