The Handmaid's Tale - study of the character Offred.

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action." The standard definition of happiness is that it is a condition of great joy and contentment. Aristotle once said that happiness depends on ourselves. Although we do not all face the same problems, going through tribulation is a part of being human. These tribulations are what ultimately result in our unhappiness. For each problem there is a solution, and for that solution to be met, action must be taken. In the novel The Handmaid's Tale, each character struggled with tribulation and adversity, coping with these troubles by either taking action, or being passive. Happiness does depend on ourselves, since it depends on the actions we take. By examining the situations and tribulations of Moria, Offred, and Offred's mother, one can recognize that Offred's inaction leads her directly to the path of unhappiness, while Moria takes action and fails to achieve happiness, whereas Offred's actions brought her happiness. In Atwood's novel, the character of Offred is the protagonist who's inaction leads to unhappiness. In the newly formed society of Gilead, the state has taken control of reproduction to combat low birth rates. Due to Offred's fertility, against her will she is classified as a handmaid, with her sole duty being to give birth for elite couples. Her discontent with being a handmaid

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Is Offred a Rebel?

Is Offred a Rebel? 'Rebel' is a term, which is highly weighed down with emotion. In society today we perceive a rebel to be a figure opposing a much stronger majority. We distinguish the rebel to be a character who fights for his/her own ideals. We see a person that will do anything almost being ruthless to destroy the boundaries set up against him/her by the stronger mass. We witness the rebel as an individual who deliberately defines a battlefield and two fighting fronts. The rebel is constantly is resisting. The only way he/she can defend his morals and values are to strike the greater that condemns his/her values and morals. Unfortunately today there are many misconceptions and preconceptions relating to the essence of a true rebel. Society tends to comprehend the rebel to be figure fighting on the front lines, spilling blood for his cause. Especially the media has delivered this image of a rebel. We must acknowledge the fact there are other forms of rebels and rebellions. It is not fair to say that the form of rebel that is described above is not valid, but still we must make a suitable distinction. We must not always consider the rebel to be an individual like 'William Wallace' who fought for his country's independence by using violence as his primary weapon. In the course of history we have witnessed another category of rebels. Characters such as Mahatma Ghandi, Dr.

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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The Handmaid's Tale - review

The Handmaid's Tale plunges immediately into an exotic, unexplained world, using unfamiliar terms like 'Handmaid,' 'Angel,' and 'Commander' that only come to make sense as the story progresses. Offred gradually delivers information about her past and the world in which she lives, often narrating through flashbacks. She narrates these flashbacks in the past tense, which distinguishes them from the main body of the story, which she tells in the present tense. The first scene, in the gymnasium, is a flashback, as are Offred's memories of the Marthas' gossip and her first meeting with the Commander's Wife. Although at this point we do not know what the gymnasium signifies, or why the narrator and other women lived there, we do gather some information from the brief first chapter. The women in the gymnasium live under the constant surveillance of the Angels and the Aunts, and they cannot interact with one another. They seem to inhabit a kind of prison. Offred likens the gym to a palimpsest, a parchment either erased and written on again or layered with multiple writings. In the gym palimpsest, Offred sees multiple layers of history: high school girls going to basketball games and dances wearing miniskirts, then pants, then green hair. Likening the gym to a palimpsest also suggests that the society Offred now inhabits has been superimposed on a previous society, and traces of the

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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What is the importance of Nick in Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaid's tale'? Consider the ways in which the writer presents this character.

What is the importance of Nick in Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaid's tale'? Consider the ways in which the writer presents this character. Nick is a very complex character. The author presents us with an uncertain character that we're not entirely sure about. Firstly Nick is a male and males in this society are very different from normal society. Males in Offred's life; the Commander, Luke, Nick is all so different from each other. But Nick is probably the most mysterious since we know exactly where we are, as the reader and Offred stand with the other two. Nick on the other hand is an enigma, a man with secret intentions, questionable loyalty and uncertain motives, even Offred's character isn't sure of him showing a lot of suspicion in the end of the novel when he was taking her away. Nick to me is very important to the whole story, he is the mystery factor of the novel, the Cigarette-Smoking-Man (X-files) of the plot, the one who knows things others don't, which I think every story through history has. From the very beginning Nick is introduced in a very intriguing manner. Unlike other people in the society, he appears confident, happy and even jaunty. He had his hat on in a jaunty angle, cleaning a car like he was caressing a lover, whistling, indulging in the forbidden pleasure of a cigarette and even made eyecontact and winked at Offred which is very highly forbidden.

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold theme anaylsis

Jason Levine English 2025 - 20 Short Response Essay 1 In the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells a story of a man whom two brothers murder in the name of honor. This story takes place in the early to mid twentieth century in a poor agrarian town in Columbia, South America. Santiago Nasar has been named as the man that took Angela Vicario's virginity and the twin brothers must kill him to restore honor to their family's name. This town is a very small tight knit community where everyone knows everyone else and most people are related in some way. When something wrong happens to a family in this community, the whole town is wronged in a way. Since the people in this community are poor the only way they can earn and keep respect is honor. Honor is, essentially, the only thing people in small communities such as this one have, next to family. If a family is dishonored in this community, they lose the respect of the community and either restore honor, move out of the community, or live in shame in the community, the latter of which is never an option. So when the brothers find out their sister's virginity has been taken by another man and shamed their family, they must restore honor to the family's name and kill the man who did it. I think the theme of this novella is how important honor is in a small community, such as the one in this story. The

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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How does Atwood portray the Commander to us in the novel ‘ The Handmaid’s Tale’.

How does Atwood portray the Commander to us in the novel ' The Handmaid's Tale' In Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel about a society under threat, the Commander is the head of a household in the Republic of Gilead. He is an older man who is married but has no children. Children are very important in Gilead and the lack of them is the main reason the existing regime has occurred. The ruling regime are there to encourage the population to increase the birth rate, in the face of a population that chose to either not produce children or embrace a homosexual approach to life. We learn a lot about the Commander over time and are given an insight into his thoughts and views through his illegal relationship with Offred, the handmaid in his house. However, there are many factors about him that we cannot answer, such as his role in the community. We assume his name is Fred, but he is always referred to as 'The Commander'. This is a military term, although what he commands is a mystery to the reader. We are also unsure whether he loves or loathes women, due to his diverse relationships with the women in his household. At the beginning of Chapter 15 we see the Commander as an obnoxious man. He doesn't wait for permission to enter 'Serena's Territory' but steps forward into the room anyway. This rude action is seen to be a deliberate attempt to show his importance. In her description

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Examining the passages below, compare and contrast the representations of the heroines choice at the end Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre.

Ashleigh-Jade BlackB9864021TMA 2 Examining the passages below, compare and contrast the representations of the heroine’s choice at the end of the novel. Discuss with reference to Jane Eyre, Volume III, Chapter XII, pp. 448–52 (from ‘Reader I married him’ to the end of the novel) and Wide Sargasso Sea, pp. 121–4 (from ‘I took the red dress down and put it against myself’ to the end of the novel). The heroine’s choice at the end of each of the novels, Wide Sargasso Sea[1] and Jane Eyre[2], are almost the complete antithesis of one another. While Jane becomes a happily married woman, seemingly finding her place in society, Antoinette become increasingly outcast, eventually leading to her imprisonment, madness and self-destruction. There are many ways that the representation of these choices can be analysed as they both rely heavily on the social conventions of the time. Each novel focuses on the idea of a strong female narrative, whose identity does not quite fit with their surroundings. Jane is an observer, struggling to find a place to belong in a society that cannot mould her into an ideal. Correa, in The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms, claims that Jane’s story is ‘[...] dominated by the search for a home and ‘family’ to replace those which rejected her at its outset.’[3] This could be a simple answer as to why at the end of the novel, Jane,

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Discuss the variety of narrative techniques used in 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

Discuss the variety of narrative techniques used in 'The Handmaid's Tale.' 'The Handmaid's Tale' has come a long way from the chronological Bildungsroman like David Copperfield or Great Expectations. Offred's complex narrative signals the post modern contempory nature of Margaret Atwood's storytelling technique. The main aim of the post-modernists was to get away from the chronological novel to 'stream of consciencenss', which represents the complex ways that the memory works. Offred is continually drawing our attention to her storytelling process, 'I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling...there will be an ending, to the story and real life will come after it.' Atwood also uses different tenses in her narrative technique, for she sometimes uses present tense for stories that were written in the past and past tense to talk about experiences in the Red Centre and the time before. 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;

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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With reference to Judith Butler's Precarious Lives, explain how Chris Abani's novel The Virgin of Flames re-imagines global community in the contexts of violence, war and mourning.

With reference to Judith Butler's Precarious Lives, explain how Chris Abani's novel The Virgin of Flames re-imagines global community in the contexts of violence, war and mourning. Chris Abani’s novel The Virgin of Flames is a post 9/11 narrative that inadvertently experiments with Judith Butler’s concept of “reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (20). This is a novel encapsulated in a theme of violence, war and mourning and the four mysteries displayed to Black by the angel Gabriel operate as a catalyst of Abani’s perception of how society has unravelled and this understanding could pave the way for a more candid approach to re-organise society. These four stages represent “the subtle movements that made and unmade a life” (143) and the mysteries; the joyful, the luminous, the sorrowful and the glorious serve to represent distinctive features of Butler’s idea of a hierarchy of grief but more importantly they epitomise her concept of how community can be re-imagined. First we need to look at Butler’s hypothesis, her main proposition is that the powers of violence, war and mourning should not bring us to retaliate but should provide us with the consciousness that our lives are fundamentally reliant on others. Acknowledging our dependency and susceptibility to others would serve as the first step in the creation of

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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Symbolism in Lord of The Flies

Idris Lacme Prof. Dr. Adina Ciugureanu Seminar: Nicoleta Stanca British Literature 2nd year 31. May. 2007 Symbolism In Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war. The boys assemble on the beach. In the election for leader, Ralph defeats Jack, who is furious when he loses. As the boys explore the island, tension grows between Jack, who is interested only in hunting, and Ralph, who believes most of the boys' efforts should go toward building shelters and maintaining a signal fire. When rumors surface that there is some sort of beast living on the island, the boys grow fearful, and the group begins to divide into two camps supporting Ralph and Jack, respectively. Ultimately, Jack forms a new tribe, fully immersing himself in the savagery of the hunt. Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at least partly based on Golding's experience with the real-life violence and brutality of World War II. Free from the rules that the society of adults' formerly imposed on them, the boys struggle with the conflicting human instincts that exist within each of them-the instinct to work toward civilization and order and the instinct to descend into savagery, violence, and chaos. As the boys splinter into factions, some behave peacefully

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  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Linguistics, Classics and related subjects
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