What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood created

What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood created

these impressions? Give detailed evidence for your answer - The Handmaid's

Tale

What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood

created these impressions? Give detailed evidence for your answer

The narrator of 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a woman who calls herself

Offred. This is not her real name, but a name that she has been given

by the particular husband and wife she is staying with. This makes the

narrator seem mysterious, and Atwood creates this impression by not

telling us the narrator's real name.

From the very start of the novel, Offred has given me the impression

that she is quite well educated by the way she speaks and expresses

things 'like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out'.

This type of simile, which she uses also, gives us the impression that

she isn't very happy about her surroundings because she is using

violent expressions and associating things, which are supposed to be

quite pleasant to things that sound very disturbing and of a violent

nature. 'Clouds like headless sheep', normally clouds are associated

with bright fluffy marshmallows and pleasant things like that, but the

narrator sees the clouds in the sky as disturbing images. All of the

way through the book she uses simile's like this to compare normal

looking objects or people. 'The smile of blood' is the phrase she uses

in chapter six, when she is describing the men, which are hanging on

the Wall. The phrase 'The smile of blood' is referring to a stain of

blood which has seeped through the white cloth which is covering up

the mans face, and she is saying it appears to look like a smile which

a child has drawn. This seems disturbing because smiles are meant to

represent happiness in people, and she turns that happiness sinister

with saying it is a smile made of blood. Also this phrase makes us

think about why it would be a smile, rather than and unhappy face,

because of him being dead. These violent associations certainly

indicates to us that the narrator is unhappy, and that is exactly why

Atwood created that quality about her, so that we know that Offred is

not happy about the situation she is in at all, and that she relates

to violence a lot of the time because she is used to seeing violence

going on around her.

At the very start of the novel the narrator was continuously slipping

in and out of the present tense, she would often talk in the past