Handmaid Tale Analysis

Offred does not claim her story to be completely true, leaving a room for ambiguity and doubt. In a search for accuracy, she constantly changes her stories, twists and recreates them in a new way. For instance, thinking about her husband Luke, she imagines him being dead, imprisoned, and escaped and believe in “all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time”(121). Another example is her description of her encounter with Nick in several completely different ways and the further confession that “it didn’t happen that way either” (317). Offred admits her story is a reconstruction, because “it’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was” (158). Though a struggle to be as honest as possible, Offred gives readers different versions of

The reader can see the world only through a veil of white wings around Handmaid’s head, the view is very narrow. Offred fragmentary narrative alternates between recollection of past and accounting everyday life in Gilead. It also interweaves with stories about other people: of rebellious Moira and Aunts-in-power, a former televangelist Serena Joy, who has “become speechless”(50). All of them have different voices in inside Offred’s tale, use different language. These infusions form an undertone of Offred’s story of survival, and occasionally denote a moral judgment of Gilead social rules. These shorter fragments and the lack of coherence disorient the reader, Offred knows it and apologies: “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments (321). However, the Historical Notes at the end of the novel shed new light on this style of writing. It turns out that the story was recorded on thirty unlabeled cassette tapes, revealed two centuries later and “arranged in no particular order” (359) by academics. Offred’s stream-of-consciousness stories easily fall into the framework of oral storytelling, or folk tales mentioned