Outline of Paragraph on narration

How does Atwood use narration to create effects?

 

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood uses non-chronological time sequences, Offred’s ambiguous reconstructed narration, as well as the Historical Notes to create a sense of confusion and suspense.

 

a)”I lie in bed, still trembling. You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone. Lying in bed, with Luke, his hand on my rounded belly. The three of us, in bed, she kicking, turning over within me.”

b) “It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sights, crosscurrents, nuances”

c) “Are there any questions?”

 

OIB Essay Practice No°2

  1. “Fiction depends for its life on place”, wrote Eudora Welty. Discuss the use and the significance of the setting in two OIB works.
  2. “The past is not a package one can lay away.” (Emily Dickinson) Explore how far this statement is true for characters from two works you have studied in OIB.
  3. As humans we create the story of who we are and then act in accordance with that story. Yet our narratives can be based on misinformation, misinterpretation, or even deliberate lies. Explore the effects of a character’s self-created story in two works you have studied in the OIB program.

A Separate Peace: Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13

Passages: the following passage might prove to be important. Re-read the sections with these passages and think about why they might be significant? What do they mean? What are important ideas, imagery, or words? How do they add to the story or a theme? Do they incorporate any literary devices?

While the group of boys lament over not having Leper in the assembly room to testify, Gene says, No one said anything. Phineas had been sitting motionless, leaning slightly forward, not far from the position in which we prayed at Devon. After a long time he turned and reluctantly looked at me. I did not return his look or move or speak. Then at last Finny straightened from this prayerful position slowly, as though it was painful for him. “Leper’s here,” he said in a voice so quiet, and with such quiet unconscious dignity, that he was suddenly terrifyingly strange to me.

Passages: the following passage might prove to be important. Re-read the sections with these passages and think about why they might be significant? What do they mean? What are important ideas, imagery, or words? How do they add to the story or a theme? Do they incorporate any literary devices?

As Gene sees the trucks coming to Devon, he says, “I thought the Jeeps looked noticeably uncomfortable from all the power they were not being allowed to use. There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left, and as I watched the Jeeps almost asserting a wish to bounce up the side of Mount Washington at eighty miles an hour instead of rolling along this dull street, they reminded me, in a comical and a poignant way, of adolescents.”

 

“[I]t seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

Thesis on Centrality of Human Relationships written in class

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood illustrates the essential human need for love through Offred’s seeking out relationships, her sensitivity to the exchange of ideas, feelings and touch, as well as her desperate desire to trust. All of these cravings depict that love is required to survive a totalitarian regime that undermines any signs of affection in order to dehumanize and control its people.