Informal Commentary on The Handmaid's Tale Excerpt

Draft Two:

Margaret Atwood, throughout the excerpt, portrays Offred's past and specifically describes two different notions of "love" Although Offred initially hesitates in bringing past events, as story moves on, she feels more comfortable with her past because she feels necessary to talk about what love really is. Through the use of stream of consciousness, and diction, she communicates to her responder with the difference between "falling in love" and "falling from love".

Let's firstly examine how stream of consciousness is used to deliver the composer's message. "Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he hav emade such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim." Notice how you are confronted with Offred's break in thoughts, mental process, and even psychological status. The key phrases/clauses here are "falling in love" and "falling into it". I think Atwood tries to distinguish between two notions of love. One is when you, as used in common English, fall in love. Another one is when you fall/break down from love. Moreover, this part of stream of consciousness is evident in the beginning of extract, "I don't want to be telling this story... I don't hav eto tell it. I don't have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out." Bit of a contrast in two stream of consciousness huh?

Diction is another literary element that contributes the author's message that women fall in love and that women fall for men. The register such as "falling in love" and "falling for him; we are falling women" demonstrate how women fall in love to fall for men. In other words, after they fall in love, they make sacrifices for men, which is unreasonable. Atwood uses language that lists something cumulatively for enhanced rhetorical emphasis. An instance from the excerpt is "the more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation."