Margaret Atwood Bread Analysis

Margaret Atwood "Bread" (1983) is the Prosecution intends to shame those who are suffering and helps the tragedy through their indifference. Her argument is secretly and emotionally .Her language is initially sly and goes down smooth, but later renders her unaware reader intoxicated with empathy. The essay utilizes artful literary techniques to accuse her reader of inhumanity, of caring too little about other human beings. She presents her logic slowly and strategically, leading her readers—comfortable and unaware—to self-incrimination: from admitting to seemingly harmless practices of everyday life to being shamed by their complicity in the world’s suffering. Atwood’s accusation addresses the heart of contemporary global conflict, illustrating

Compliant, the reader accepts what appears to be a simple statement of the facts, a statement that will evolve into an accusation. The next two stories are different. They describe two scenarios that the readers view as foreign, initially imagining the bread in these stories to be different from that in the first, their bread. The language is very matter-of-fact, while the scenes she describes are grotesque: “She is starving, her belly is bloated, flies land on her eyes; you brush them off with your hand.” This is seductive, as Atwood paints the scenes without immediate explanation of their significance. It is almost as if she is telling a joke, and the reader is waiting for the punch-line, expecting it to be someone else who is embarrassed. The story is also written in the second person, compelling the reader toward empathy and compassion. This is also seductive in that it leads readers to place themselves in a hypothetical situation, which of course turns out to be not hypothetical at all, but rather a description of real tragedy. For the reader, these second and third stories transform bread into something dangerous, an agent of