Author's treatment of time in "Handmaid's tale"

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Discuss the author’s treatment of time in a novel you have studied.

                                                         

A dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is authored by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Through the novel, Atwood’s treatment of the time has an essential role delivering the themes and the messages to the readers. Atwood employs Offred as the main charater to narrate the story in an unchronological way. Later, the Professor James Darcy Pieixoto narrates the story in year 2195.

In Atwood’s novel, Offred tells the story in an unchronological order, and enables the readers see the differences between totalitarian society of Gilead and pre-Gilead society. In Gilead, a group of religious leaders has taken the power. Gilead is a society founded on a “return to traditional values,” gender roles and on the subjugation of women by men. Atwood uses Offred’s flashbacks to emphasize the brutality of the republic of Gilead. The day when Jenine goes into labour is an example. When Jenin’s baby born, Aunt Elizabeth holds up the baby, Offred has a flashback of Luke. “Luke with me in hospital, standing beside my head, holding my hand” directly show the difference between birth giving in pre-Gilead and Gilead, where the mother doesn’t even get to hold the baby, and give name to the baby of her own. In addition, the woman’s role in Gilead gets divided according to their fertility and age. The fertile ones become handmaids and the others become wives, marthars or aunts who bear the handmaids. Therefore, the unchronological order helps Atwood to criticize the totalitarian society and the religious people who use women’s bodies as political figure.

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In addition, the unchronological order creates suspense to the readers. The readers may get attracted to the book to see the whole picture and the conclusion of the story.

To characterise the protagonist, Offred, Atwood mainly uses the ‘night’ chapters of the book. Atwood structures the novel in different sections, and the ‘night’ is the most frequent section. The nights’plays an important role in the novel as it is the only time of the day when Offred has her ‘own’ time. “The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will” shows that

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