I'm already sick of Margaret Atwood and her free association vocabulary games.
"Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie, they'd say to children when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet...." And then my favorite. New paragraph. "The book of Job." New paragraph. Mind-blowing; they're not even pronounced the same way.
Congratulations, Margaret. You discovered homonyms. Oh but wait, no you didn't. All the female contemporary literary writers do it. Annie Proulx does it, Susan Orlean is infamous for it. Yeah, I get it, you're a writer and you're really into words and how they sound and look at how whacky and interesting your mind is supposed to be because you can go from talking about your job to how you never had a dog in three sentences. But I say no more! Stop with the word games and tell the goddamn story already. You made your point about language being taken away from you in the first hundred pages when you homonized the shit out of a bunch of other words and got aroused playing Scrabble. Come up with a new conceit already.
I hope I don't get as sick of her as you have that quickly... since I have to read four books by her this semester, between this class and one other. >_<
whoa....
You got significantly angrier about it than I did, but there were moments when I thought she was wandering away from the story. I didn't notice it so much with the words, but she'd do the same thing with similes/metaphors/comparisons, and that bugged me to no end. There was one in particular - I can't find the page number right now, of course, but she's describing the three women who have been hung on the wall. She says she doesn't want to be a dancer, like them, which I thought was a really powerful image. But then, she goes on to list three or four other things that they look like, and it was a bit of metaphor overload. Totally destroyed the simple-but-effective image that she conjured up the first time around. I feel like I remember reading in some how-to book for writers that going on such long tangents was show-offy and a big no-no. Given that she's pretty famous, it apparently worked for her, but I still don't like it. Her writing has such a stark, minimalistic feel to it - I think that it would have been much more effective had she reined it in a little.
After having read more, "stark" and "minimalistic" are words that I don't think apply at all here. Half the details in any given paragraph are not strictly necessary for the story - I mean, they develop the setting somewhat, but they're kind of beside the point.
But what really gets me, more than anything else, is the lack of quotation marks. There's absolutely no reason to dispense with such a feature of proper English writing: the only effect is to make it constantly necessary to re-read sentences when it becomes apparent that part of the sentence is actually a quotation. Honestly, WHY?!
Ahh! I completely agree on how annoying that was. I really hope I learn in class tomorrow some deep metaphorical meaning behind her not using them so I can sleep at night.
Atwood/Offred (not that Atwood IS Offred, but they function somewhat similarly on this point of punctuation) actually uses the quotation marks about half the time, I think. They seem to be present when Offred is existing in the present, as a whole person.
Offred does not use them when she is recollecting her past. This makes some sense, as it's more paraphrasing, and it's all in her head anyways. They cut out from her present starting in chapter 24, after her first night with the Commander, when she talks about needing perspective, and how she is dropping down to two dimensions and forgetting the past. They start to come back as her relationship with the Commander intensifies and there's some sense of...not equality, but a leveling that even allows for communication between them. I think Atwood uses quotation marks as a way of marking Offred's state of mind.
ADDITIONALLY--
Yes, there is a lot of rhapsodizing on words. But they are Offred's words. I feel there might be some close-mindedness in reading this text, and a recognition of a surface feature that has appeared elsewhere without considering WHY it's there.
Page 33-- "The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa. Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind."
Page 95-- "One detaches oneself. One describes."
Page 110-- "None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself."
All Offred has left is her own thoughts. She cannot read, she has no tasks during the day besides going to the market and the Ceremony. She has nothing to do with her time, and nothing to distract her, so she gets caught up in her own head. We get stream of consciousness.
But this also serves the function of making her life bearable on a psychological level. What has happened to her, to her family, and to her concept of existence, is horrifically traumatizing. She doesn't know if her husband is still alive, she doesn't know what happened to her young daughter, she has no friends, the women she lives with see has as filth and/or an imposition.
By engaging in her free associations, Offred is trying to create some sense of order and sense in her life, is trying to maintain some level of humanity and individuality and sanity, because all other vehicles and expressions of this that we take for granted have been stripped from her.
She has no way to know anything about the world around her, and no one to discuss it with, except herself. The only way she can try to understand what's happening is by retreating within herself.
If she can intellectualize it, she can distance herself form what is happening to her, detach and describe. Her sense of self is in flux throughout the book. Often, when she is free associating, it is around things like the bodies hung on the wall, jobs in this crazy world, things that are so disturbing as to be difficult to wrap her mind around, or things that are so complicated, so overwhelming for her and her life that she CAN'T just explain it away with a quick turn of a phrase. This is an entirely different world for her, and she lacks the single explanations to make it comprehensible.
She also needs to train herself away from hope, to a certain extent. It would be very easy, in a world as isolating as hers is, to see some profound connection between the red of a tulip and the red of the blood from a dead man's mouth, to try to read some message into it. Her constant free association can be seen as a means of keeping her own mind in check, allowing it to flow and have its own independent thoughts that she can revel in, but still constrained by her awareness of them. She thinks about her own thoughts.
The story IS in the words, they are not a deviation from the story. What she chooses to free associate, when she does, all this reflects somehow on what is happening around her and a greater understanding of what is happening comes through those free associations. The interior reflects upon and on the exterior, and the exterior back in, in an endless loop.
I agree with you, until that last paragraph. I think that being inside Offred's head, in a world in which every day is much like the next, and she is denied any form of mental stimulation, requires that she engage in some sort of differentiation, however artificial. Annoying, at times, but valid.
The personal attacks were unnecessary. They detract from your point.
-CZ
You know what?
I've had time to think on it. I have spent a LOT of time thinking about it, and re-reading this thread and others.
I was pissed and very emotional when responding to this thread. I don't like that, because it has always been drummed into my head that it's weak and it's not a valid way to make an argument. If that's all there is to an argument, then it truly doesn't hold up well. But when there is some level of passion behind a factual/text/reason-based argument, it enhances it. What had truly been frustrating me on the blog at the point when I made my initial comment was that a significant portion of the posts and comments on The Handmaid's Tale were, to me, whining and complaining with little to no evidence of critical thought, or displacing frustration and blame to sources from which they did not entirely originate. That trend has changed since, which has made this a far more interesting forum of expression.
We're in school. The point is to learn, to expand the mind, and to examine our own beliefs critically. On second consideration, I think it's right to call people on it when they start turning into a giant rolling ball of "gees, this sucks, oh yeah, i totally agree with you," creating a groupthink that doesn't show much evidence of thinking, and that doesn't seek to understand anything, just kvetch. Yes, there were knee-jerk responses. It is one thing have these responses (which is completely valid), and look to see if others had them-- it's another thing entirely to frame it as a well-thought out or researched argument, both in this thread and others.
So, on reflection, I don't think focused frustration "detract[s] from [my] point." I think it is separate from my argument. And if this is to be a forum where we can't interact with posters as individuals, I think it loses its function.
If anything, pegging all of the anger of JackKerouacSucks was out of line because, while he opened the initial thread and might have put far more into it that I found disagreeable than another would have, other people were frustrating me, and anyone could have started the thread.
The last paragraph was primarily directed at the gentleman opinionated about Kerouac.
Sir, if you the need to insert your genitalia, particularly in the large print title that is unavoidable to readers of the blog, I would find it far less offensive if you somehow then tied it in to your argument or otherwise justified using such language. Otherwise, it comes across as nothing other than being painfully sexist, close-minded, and some level of an attack on others.
But you're right, CZ, this is an inappropriate forum to start a fight about it & let my emotions get the best of me. I am attempting to remove said paragraph as it isn't really productive, but I would love to hear the original poster on this thread attempt to justify his title choice.
First of all, I'm disappointed that I missed the paragraph. This is absolutely the forum to start a fight about this book-- we post in relative anonymity, and I say relative because I'm too lazy to go look up anybody that says something that bothers me in a class blog-- and I think offending people is a great way to get them to take a side.
You may have noticed my tags, which were supposed to help the post come off as more tongue-in-cheek than perhaps it was interpreted. The topic line of the post was a minimalist approximation (Arnold Schwarzenegger) of the words that I wanted to express after having read The Handmaid's Tale. As other people have pointed out on this blog, the men in the book, with the exception of maybe Nick, all perform so absolutely dismally that it's really a frustrating and off-putting experience for any female-respecting man to slog through it. And there's another reason why I put that word in the topic: it made you read it. That being said, I would also point out that as far as words for male genitalia go, I could have made far worse choices, and testicles is a fairly sterile, medical term.
You make a good argument about the importance of words in the book, and I think your explanation for quotation marks sounds smart and is probably accurate. What I and those who have somewhat spinelessly agreed with my post are trying to say is that Atwood is using a cannon to swat a mosquito here, and turning off male readers as collateral damage. Every time she writes another one of her short-obtuse-metaphorical- paragraphs, the reader has to stop and think about what she means, and if she inserts a bunch of these in the middle of a narrative it really interrupts the flow of the story and most readers will simply give up and ignore the deeper meaning after say, ten such instances.
Take a book like Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I only choose because think a lot of college students have read it, there the author only employs the sort of hyper-associative narrative, which Atwood sprinkles throughout, at the end of his rather long chapters, and I think the sparing use of these sorts of sentences gets him a lot more mileage of out his readers.
Also, you're ignoring what I thought would be the MOST offensive part of my post. If you read much contemporary lit, you start to see this type of wordplay pop up in a lot of (not necessarily feminist) female work. For another example I think most people can relate to, take the movie Adaptation, which contains excerpts from Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief. Even in these limited excerpts, we see multiple examples of the same device being used by Orlean to draw basically meaningless connections about the words she employs. In my opinion, and the few others who have chimed in to this thread, this conceit is frivolous, overused, and annoying.
So let it all out. I know here at Pomona we tend to live in something of a speech-police-state, but you're obviously smart and I'm too interested in your thoughts to listen to the watered-down version. Trust me, I've been called much worse.
k, so, basically, paragraph said have the balls (that you seem so proud to display) to look at something rather than classify it as "All the female contemporary literary writers do it," and to further ask yourself just WHY they do it, be it one book, one author, or multiples of either. Ya know, actually THINK. I removed it initially because it felt like sinking to a level I didn't want to fight at, that would degrade me. But you say bring it, so consider it brought.
You lump it as a female characteristic, and thus you seem to somehow have the magical testicular power to disregard it all as tripe. That might not have been your intent, but that is how it came across. That, my friend, is sexist.
I'd also be interested to know just when you found the time to read EVERY SINGLE female contemporary author's works, given your blanket statement defining them all as one stylistically inbred group. Why have multiple women write when they all write the same thing? I guess the magical men have one up on us poor weaker things by being able to be seen as individuals and thus we need multiple male authors where one female would suffice.
"Congratulations, Margaret. You discovered homonyms."
Patronize much, do we? And you didn't think this comment would make you sound like a jerk?
"look at how whacky and interesting your mind is supposed to be"
I would like to highlight here your use of the phrase "supposed to be." I feel it's safe to assume you disagree. I find it interesting that, while in "Neuromancer," people were able to attribute some thoughts, perspectives, and ideas to individual characters, what is in this text represented CLEARLY as inside Offred's head, everyone seems to be jumping on the "attribute it to the author" bandwagon, implying that while a man is special enough to be able to remove himself from a situation, or write about something outside of himself, women can't, and furthermore, that the character Offred is unimportant, and her story isn't actually her own. Yes, authors, of BOTH genders, often insert their own personal philosophies into their books (Heinlein much?). I don't think Atwood did it as much as people seem to feel she did, though.
"You made your point about language being taken away from you in the first hundred pages when you homonized the shit out of a bunch of other words and got aroused playing Scrabble."
I don't think that's the point. Yes, language has been taken away, women aren't allowed to read anymore, but you CANNOT take away someone's thoughts, you cannot truly control their mind and therefore cannot control the person completely. If she had stopped with the free-association, Offred truly would have been under the control of Gilead and would be nothing more than a meat puppet, but rather than have her brain temporarily turned off, it would be functionally removed.
Imagine you are in a position like Offred's. Hell, sit back and listen to your own thoughts when you're doing nothing at some point. I feel I can safely say most everyone free associates to some degree. There is NOTHING for Offred to do most of the time. All she has are her thoughts to entertain herself. Essentially, she lives alone. Yes, there are other people in the household, but she has little to no contact with them, they aren't interested in talking to her. Have you ever truly lived alone without human contact? Your brain starts going a bit wacky. Also, see the above comments I made on Offred's free association, I feel it would be redundant to repeat them all here.
"Every time she writes another one of her short-obtuse-metaphorical- paragraphs, the reader has to stop and think about what she means, and if she inserts a bunch of these in the middle of a narrative it really interrupts the flow of the story and most readers will simply give up and ignore the deeper meaning after say, ten such instances."
I'm so sorry you find it that stressful, painful, and/or inconvenient to think for yourself, and would rather have someone tell you exactly what you should think. I pity you, and fear for the future.
I think you're also missing the point that these aren't interruptions in the story, but actually are key to the story. If you could be so taxed as to let your brain even flit across what is the Book of Job-- a story about a man of extreme patience, who is tested by God, but then is given everything back and more--you might see some connection to the story, such as hope in suffering, something Offred clings to in things like her fantasies about what happened to her husband Luke.
I cannot even begin to think of the whining and moaning that would persist if Atwood had spelled out every single one of these thoughts throughout the book. One, it would be far longer, and two, people would probably start complaining she was insulting their intelligence by spelling everything out for them. Bit of a rock and hard place for a woman writer to be, hmm? Or she could, I suppose, completely remove any interior thoughts from Offred and offer us instead a delightful, forgettable little 15-page story.
Dystopia is a well-established literary genre. The ones I have had contact with in the past have been by men, with men as the central character. I am not saying these are invalid. I am saying they only tell one aspect of a many-faceted story. Here's a new facet. Have the guts to let it expand your mind a little.
I'm not saying everyone should love "The Handmaid's Tale," or Margaret Atwood, or even your "female contemporary literary writers." What I do ask is that everyone go at it with as open a mind as possible, and seriously question why something is pissing you off, and why the author might be using it, especially if you think it is something that widely pisses people off. Could it be that Atwood's life goal was to be the bane of an English class at a small college in southern California in the spring of 2008? Conceivably, I suppose.
But I feel she's too smart and is far too aware of herself as a writer, and especially as a female writer (because women are seen as representing their gender when men far more often have the liberty to be individuals) for her to not have a deeper motive, and to want her presumably intelligent readership to flex their brains, and let them do some of the work to truly broaden their minds. Give someone a fish, and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, and they will be fed for a lifetime. Or, ya know, until the mercury poisons everything. But so far as I know, no one has yet died from thinking as an individual and forming unique opinions and insights from scraps of raw material.
Switching gears somewhat, your tags came off more as "grrr, I'm male and angry, grrrr, listen to me rant and rage. grunt grunt grunt." I suppose you might have meant something tongue-in-cheek with literary chauvinism, but for me, it didn't really work.
I would have read your post regardless of your title, as I feel it's important to read the whole blog to get a broader idea of what people are thinking but don't have time to say in class, and as a result, broaden my own mind. In fact, the title made me want to not read it, because it was crass and indicated that you didn't actually have anything to say and wasn't worth wasting my time. If people hadn't responded, I probably would have sighed, grimaced, mentally called you a jerk, and then moved on, hoping you wouldn't have some position of control in the world in the future. The fact that so many people chimed in in agreement without any critical thought was unsettling, and moved me read rather than glance over, and to respond.
"would also point out that as far as words for male genitalia go, I could have made far worse choices, and testicles is a fairly sterile, medical term." It is exactly the sterile medical term that I object to. Words like balls, cojones, rocks, etc, have connotations. There's an attitude, a feeling, emotional meaning in such slang words. Testicles brings to mind wrinkly male gonads full of squirmy sperm and testosterone. There's no connotation, just the medical. This is an image I really could have done without, especially in conjunction with a text like "The Handmaid's Tale," which already has some disturbing mildly abstracted sexual imagery and scenes.
There are also other phrases you could have used. "Frackin' Atwood/Handmaid's Tale." "*#%&^$(!#)$!*%!!!!!!!", and "I get it already, move the hell on" all spring to mind immediately, though I'm sure plenty of other possibilities exist.
By using something that was so particular to men, so DEFINING of men, as your condemnation of what you termed "female contemporary litera[ture]," you are hyper-gendering your response, and turning your response into a battle between sexes. By using testicles as your original counter argument/eye-grabber, there was a certain implied "I am an empowered male and I call you, woman, crap." I am gonna go out on a limb and say this is not what you meant, and you probably weren't even conscious of the possible implications in your title. But dude? Still not cool.
There has also been a whole lot of "men are treated like/are crap in this book" running around the blog. Let's consider a little context first. The book was published in 1986. Women were starting to be more established in the business world, but it was still tenuous, and there was very much a mentality of work OR family, far more than there is today, where the current economy often dictates that women MUST work.
What good would it have necessarily done if Luke had gone into a rage with the protagonist when she lost her job? Yes, it's unfair that there's now a law that women can't hold property or have jobs, but it's a law, and good law or bad law, it's still the law. It is a complete overwhelming fact of life that cannot be challenged. Also, overnight, the entire society has changed. Frightening. Safest to not make waves, and to highlight "It was just a job, just something you did with your time, but you're still alive, and you still have the people you love." What would you have had him do?
Something else that I think is interesting to pull into play--in the back of my edition, there's an interview with Atwood in which she says "there isn't anything in the book not based on something that has already happened in history or in another country, or for which actual supporting documentation is not already available." So in that way, her book is an compiling of ALL the sucky things that have happened in the past in totalitarian theocracies. We have had, we do have little bits of suckage throughout history and throughout our world today. But it seems that perhaps people only really notice when they become unbelievably huge, all-encompassing things.
Something else I feel is important to point out--women aren't exactly portrayed in a positive light. Yes we're meant to sympathize with Offred because she's our protagonist, but there's a constant competition and hatred between women in the book, between classes and within the classes. The women and the men essentially exist in separate worlds, brought together only for the express purpose of copulation. Because of their isolation, I would argue, men and women no longer know how to coexist, there's no real protocol anymore for common civility. There is only the power dynamic of men having authority over women, and, in the case of a handmaid, complete authority over her body as a vessel, because she has no value as a person. To behave elsewise is treasonous and punishable by death. The men on the Wall come from the Men's Salvagings. To a certain extent, I think what Atwood is trying to show that they have no choice, men or women. In closing, some words that seemed to fit the situation and give some human reason for the way characters treat one another in the book:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
Now THAT was a post. I'd ask you out but I'm afraid you might sue me. I won't be able to really respond until some time tomorrow, but I just wanted to say well done, my chauvinist hide feels quite tanned. You even incorporated the holocaust.
Holy crap! It's actually true!
-Nick
And thus, as it turns out, you've managed to lose without even taking part in the conversation.
Well, yes it's true.
eeeee....I'm overwhelmed by the sheer length and venom of this post... confrontations make me uncomfortable...I think I'll stick to nice and uncontroversial and rational and boring...
The speech police have arrived:
As a "female-respecting man" -- feminist is not a dirty word, friends -- I wanted to echo the point made in class about Luke's response. Yeah, it makes me feel pretty uneasy to imagine him reacting in a way that could be interpreted as completely selfish and sexist (as discussed, there are other interpretations...), BUT I think it's a good feeling to have. Why? Because it really makes you think about why Luke's reaction is inappropriate and to question how you would/should react. She's doing the world an important (necessary?) service by imagining such a future, even if it makes many of us feel a little defensive at first.
Anyway, I think you're seeking the right kind of dialogue here and wanted to respect it by calling you out. Yes, Atwood's portrayal of men can be a "frustrating and off-putting experience", but I think it's also invaluable. Let's try to move from 'I think she's being unfair' to 'for what reasons might she be doing this / how is she commenting on our society'.
Police, peace, out.
First of all, I want you to take a moment to re-read your post. Like actually read it. Pinch yourself; you are awake. You actually wrote that.
Look, Mr. "Female-respecting man," with your quotes that make it sound like you're being ironic and really have no respect for women at all, writing what you just did is a little bit like saying that it's a good thing the holocaust happened, because now we can look inside ourselves and realize that it's a bad thing to commit genocide.
I personally believe that the civilized male gender, and especially the literate, intellectual, and probably feminist-leaning readership of Ms. Atwood, has enough intellectual maturity to actively prevent anything even remotely similar to the situation described in The Handmaid's Tale. Let's drop the whole sexual politics scenario for a moment, and think about how you would feel if all of a sudden your sister or mother were fired from their jobs. We both know that us men can and would do better than Luke and the rest of the Gileadean men. Or maybe you did mean for those quotation marks to be ironic.
Then again, states where women are treated this way do exist in the real world, and I guarantee you the people there are not reading this book. The point I was trying to make with my original post is that it's not the content of the prose that frustrates me as a reader, it's the style with which she laboriously tells what is really a pretty uneventful story.
I think that Atwood writes with a deliberately contrived style that many other successful female authors popular in the share, and I think that that makes her work almost formulaic in its conformity. That's the discussion I'm interested in engaging in, not watching you try to impress the girls in the class with some imagined sense of maturative superiority.
I'd also like to point out that you never actually policed any of my speech. You took one quote that you agree with, then came up with a silly moral to explain your own emotional masochism. And you're gonna have to stop blowing that whistle around Pomona, or someone will think you're being raped.
That's exactly it: she laboriously tells an uneventful story!
The entire time I was reading it, I thought, "This is like a gendered version of 1984, but so much less plausible!" and yet to make any progress in the plot I had to sit through a lot of writing that is, in my opinion, desperately trying to be literary and failing on account of precisely that. You don't have to use ornate Margaret Atwood language to write a literarily significant book. You can, and obviously some people are going to like it and some won't.
I won't try and assert that women writers do this kind of thing more often than men - for my part, I think both sexes of the human race tend to overdo it on the prose sometimes, and like I said, that's my opinion.
The book feels incredibly derivative from 1984. Both this and that novel are realistically implausible, but The Handmaid's Tale feels even more contrived because the characters are all so useless.
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that just because The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist book (whether or not the author wants that label, it's been given), doesn't mean that we shouldn't be allowed to gripe about it. Just like we gripe about Heinlein's soapbox philosophy and about Gibson's incoherence, we can gripe about Margaret Atwood's excessive (ab)use of language.
Your points here are by and large well taken, with one exception:
The entire time I was reading it, I thought, "This is like a gendered version of 1984, but so much less plausible!"
Which implies that 1984 is ungendered?
Sorry, a "more explicitly gendered version" would be more accurate.
Yes, everyone is entitled to an opinion, yes, everyone is allowed to gripe. What is problematic is when someone starts out the gripe, and extrapolates it to an ENTIRE group. In responding to the individual gripe, but not saying anything about the group extrapolation, there's implied complicitness.
I believe that the point being made elsewhere in this thread is that griping is perhaps less useful and interesting than examining what the effects of the prose are, other than boring you.
Furthermore, I sincerely disagree that the 'uselessness' of the characters is contrived. If you think about the public responses to some of the more disturbing political developments of our collective time of political awareness, I'd hardly call them useful. And that's in the absence of much, if any, anti-activist threat from the government. The inaction and compliance of the characters may be less gripping than would be a heroic tale of resistance, such as, for instance, that contrived by the movie. However, it makes, in some ways, a much stronger statement on the horror of totalitarianism than 1984, by denying the characters any particular moment of glory. And I say this as someone who had nightmares about 1984 after I first read it.
Okay, my bad. The intended light side of my post fell flat. I put "female-respecting man" in quotes because I think it's funny for 2 reasons: 1) people are tiptoeing around the term "feminist" and 2) we pretty much all want to be considered 'female-respecting.'
The whole 'speech police' thing was supposed to be funny... my title was supposed to be a siren noise... I wasn't trying to police your speech.
Particularly not funny? My word association attempt to be clever at the end. "Police, peace, out." Get it? Not funny? Okay, let's agree that was idiotic together. Sweet.
So to go back to something someone mentioned about 15 posts up, I am interested in the use of quotations throughout the novel. Clearly Atwood is trying to signfy something by never using quotes when recollecting conversations in the past. Offred often mentions that she does not know if what she is telling is even true anymore. Thus she is not a very reliable narrator. By not having quotes, we are never sure whether the conversation we are privy to ever actually occurred. There is no clear distinction between Offred's sense of history and reality. What I am more curious about though is the conversations in the present that are without punctuation. On page 10, Offred listens through the door to Rita and Cora's conversation. There are no quotes and I suspect this is because Offred is not physically in the scene and only listening to snippets but not necessarily the root of the conversation. But Offred is always in the room with the Commander when they have their conversations and there are times when they warrent no quotes. For examle, on page 210, when the Commander asks Offred what she thinks about and she replies that she doesn't think much, there are no quotes. Are we supposed to read this as perhaps the conversation is a figment of Offred's imagaination?
Yeah, I interpreted the lack of quotation marks as a way of giving the story a sort of dream-like state. I dunno, at least for me, dialogue without quotation marks gives off a very different feel than dialogue with quotation marks. When there actually are quotation marks, dialogue becomes more jarring and alive. Without them, speech comes off as very subdued. I always imagined Offred going through the day in a trance, mentally floating in and out of situations, because of how broken her spirit is. The lack of quotation marks around most of the dialogue in the story helps me picture this, as it's as if she's only partially paying attention during most conversations. I agree with what snaggle said above about Offred being an unreliable narrator - there aren't quotation marks because not only is she weakly focused on conversations, she might also be just imagining things in her delirium.