The Handmaid's Tale - Paper

With close reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, discuss the ways in which Atwood used narrative strategies and with what effect.

The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in the future in the country previously recognized as the United States of America; in the story that country is acknowledged as the Republic of Gilead, which was founded on the philosophy of male supremacy. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that is centered on poverty and tyranny. Margaret Atwood uses narrative strategies such as stream of consciousness and flashback to help explain the plot of the story and the characterization of the narrator—Offred. All of that contributes to help convey an important theme in the book which is the presence and manipulation of power and control over others.

Stream of consciousness is a technique in which Atwood uses to record Offred’s thoughts and emotions in a “stream” as they come to mind, without the use of order or structure; jumping from one memory to another. The main purpose of that is to set a mood into the novel and explain Offred’s character in a better way to help convey the importance of power in a society. “Things are back to normal. How can I call this normal?” –page 282… This is a good example of how Atwood uses stream of consciousness. In the first sentence of chapter 44, Offred says that everything is back to normal. Directly after that, she questions herself—how can she call that normal? Atwood did that to make the reader step back from reading for a moment and take time to reconsider the purpose of the novel and look at the big picture. The reader would think, “How is this normal?” He/she would then question the society in which Offred is living in, thus bringing him/her to the theme—is it normal for men to have far further control than women and abuse them in a society? Atwood uses this narrative strategy, stream of consciousness, to convey the importance of the manipulation of power to the reader.

Throughout the story, Atwood also uses the...