Essay Plan Offred As Trustworthy Narrator
Essay Plan Offred As Trustworthy Narrator
Essay Plan Offred As Trustworthy Narrator
Intro:
Main:
1) Fragmented Narratives: Aspects of Offred’s narration repeatedly disrupt and undermine any
sense of uncertainty that what she is describing is what actually happened within the story
world. Her mind jumps between vividly realised present details and flashbacks. Offred draws our
attention to the fact that her telling is a reconstruction after events have happened, and that she
is not always a trustworthy narrator.
4) First person narration: usually comes with a narrator being unrealizable, as it is filtered and
shaped by emotions, values & experiences. Her account is fallible as it is told from her
perspective. Moreover, she is a homodiegetic narrator meaning she is narrating events have
happened to her- everything is told from her perspective. Flashbacks with no quotes show that her
memories are inexact-> It is a first-person narrative and she makes that clear from the start that
this is what she remembers.
o If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending.
- “Even men used to say, I’d like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I’d like to lay her.
All this is pure speculation. I don’t really know what men used to say.” (p. 37)
- “Our author, then, was one of many, and must be seen within the broad outlines of the
moment in history of which she was a part.” (Historical Notes)
- “Supposing then, the tapes to be genuine, what of the nature of the account itself?
Obviously, it could not have been recorded during the period of time it recounts, since, if
the author is telling the truth, no machine or tapes would have been available to her.”
(historical Notes)
- However, by the fact that she intentionally withholds information like her name it again
adds to that sense of being unreliable.
o “The other names in the document are equally useless for the purpose of
identification and authentication… There is a high probability that these were, in
any case, pseudonyms adopted to protect these individuals should the tapes be
discovered” (Historical Notes)
- AO5, Reliable: Although Offred herself tells the reader she is herself is not exactly sure of
what happened she is mostly presented as a trustworthy narrator. Undeniably, memory,
like language is not entirely reliable when it comes to reconstructing reality, nevertheless
her recounting of events does seem to have truth in them. she is retelling her story.
Perhaps more important than factual evidence is the emotions behind the story like this
that historians fail to sometimes see.
o “I am coming up to a part you will not like at all, because in it I did not behave well
but I will try nonetheless to leave nothing out. After all you’ve been through you
deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but involves the truth.” (p.268)
o She’s very detailed when describing things which gives the affect that she’s
remembering them correctly.
hat we actually have in Offred, though it takes us some time to realize, is a narrator
who is “reconstructing” the events from memory; this is the first hindrance to her
reliability. The Historical Notes disclose that the whole narrative is a
“reconstruction”, reminding us that the faulty status of Offred’s memory –
something that she does sometimes highlight throughout the narrative, even if not
prominently – must be taken under consideration as well.
Conclusion:
Within Offred narrative Atwood draws attention to “storytelling process, commenting on the ways
this telling shapes and changes real experience…and reminding reader that she may not always be a
reliable narrator”.
“On a first reading, the reader accepts the narrative convention that allows the teller of the story,
eventually known as Offred, to convey her tale even though she explicitly states that she lacks the
means of recording it.”
Quotes:
5) “Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing in any case forbidden.”
(p.49)
AO5:
Atwood, Margaret 2: I would not put anything into it that human societies have not done
already
Heidi Macpherson (Offred as unheroic): Offred “is not heroic. She is, instead, a passive
everywoman, awaiting rescue”
“You’re dealing with a character whose ability to move in the society was limited. She was boxed
in… the more limited and boxed in you are, the more important details become”
This late disclosure of information (taking place in the last fifteen pages of the novel) is a case of
what Meir Sternberg and Tamar Yacobi (2015, p. 419) call “the dynamics of (un)reliability” in
their comprehensive study of narrative unreliability and the mechanisms readers employ in
order to make sense of narrative inconsistencies.
Gragoatá, Niterói, “It didn’t Happen that Way”: The Role of Narrative Inconsistencies... On the
contrary, we suggest that when we, as readers, finally perceive her efforts to engage her listener
through the use of narrative suspense, it should further our empathy towards the Handmaid,
and this is substantiated by the way Atwood organizes the narrative and by the juxtaposition of
Offred’s storytelling and Professor Pieixoto’s discourse in the twenty-second century.
General:
Offred is unreliable:
She jumps back and forth from past to present and there can be confusion
She’s very opinionated
Likes to assume what people are thinking about her
Sometimes changes her story
She also can’t remember a large portion of her life