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Annotations Of The Handmaid's Tale

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My active reading throughout the novel, A Handmaid’s Tale, are not the highest quality annotations, but they do have strong elements that I can build on. Within my annotations, I consider the motivations behind the author’s word choices and the details that are included. I use ideas from class to form my own hypothesis about new events in the book, but I do not do well writing down the full version of my thoughts in the margin, which sometimes leaves me lost as to why I annotated specific words or phrases or where I was going with my idea as I only have a fragment of my idea written. The first annotation that I want to present is on page 7 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Within the first chapter assigned, this was the annotation I deemed the best. …show more content…

My annotation was about the idea of the story being a “reconstruction” and I brought up the idea that our narrator, Offred, was an unreliable narrator because throughout the story her emotional input influences our views on characters and events throughout the story. Within my annotation itself and my writing on the Active Reading Slideshow, I did not provide much background to what an “unreliable narrator” really is and how the story being labeled as a “reconstruction” made me believe that Offred was unreliable. Throughout the chapter I have annotations that marked Offred as an unreliable narrator, but I failed to connect these pages to the annotation that I believed to be the highest quality when I found a quote that I felt best supported the idea of her unreliability. Writing that a narrator is unreliable is a big claim to make, and I did not provide sufficient evidence or background to support my thoughts on this claim. This annotation, while being a big claim, also did not analyze how being an unreliable narrator affected the story or why Marget Atwood made Offred unreliable. Though the annotation itself helped me in class on 4/3 and 4/5 when we had discussions in small groups and created whiteboard presentations, if I had provided myself a stronger analytical foundation, it would have been easier for my classmates and I because we wouldn’t have had to spend time finding the quotes that connected to our claim throughout the chapter, and why would’ve we had analytical questions like “why did margaret atwood make Offred an unreliable narrator” to direct our conversation and we would’ve been able to discover more about the text with more time to dig deeper ideas. I will try to get more

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