The technique of constantly drawing attention to the way fiction is created is called Metanarrative Technique. The emphasis throughout is on process and reconstruction, where ‘truth’ is only a matter of the teller’s perspective, by showing how stories, truth, even history can be revised, for example, Offred thinks about killing the commander when he asks to kiss her, but she didn’t really. She added this in when she was making the tapes: ‘In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind; I put that in afterwards.’ Her narrative is a discontinous one, with its frequent time shifts, short scenes, and its unfinished ending. One of the first things noticed is the way the story shifts abruptly from one scene to another and from present time to the past, so that the narrator’s present sistuation and her past history are only gradually revealed. In reading the book, one can exercise reconstruction as we piece together present detail with fragments of remembered experience, revealed by flashbacks. It is 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 past.
Offred’s story is unusual as stories of the oppressed do not usually survive, whereas official accounts do. Atwood shows through her metanarrative technique that history or any story is never the whole truth: the news on tv before the ceremony shows how people can change history, ‘Such as it is: who knows if any of it is true? It could be old clips, it could be faked.’ Offred says ‘They show us only victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news?’
Offred’s real belief is in the power of words.‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a message for an audience she doesn’t know. There are parallels between Offred’s story, the previous handmaid’s message: ‘Nolite te bastardes carborundum’ and Atwood’s book; they are all authors passing on messages. They are artists and in any monolithic regime they would be shot. ‘They always do that to artists. Why? Because they are messy. They don’t fit. They make squarking noises. They protest. They insist on some kind of standard of humanity which any such regime is going to violate…And the artists will always protest and they’ll always get shot. Or go into exile.’ (Margaret Atwood: ‘Converstaions’) Offred believe she is taping her story for an audience. We find out later that she is taping it for Luke, ‘I tell, therefore you are.’
Some important episodes of narrative technique in the novel
