Monday, September 5, 2011

The Handmaid's Tale 3

"What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these men is Luke. Luke wasn't a doctor. Isn't." (33)

In the changing of tense from wasn't to isn't in this sentence, a reader learns a lot about Luke and who he was in Offred's life. Offred seems to still believe that Luke is alive, somewhere, but she also has the reality embedded in her mind that he might - probably is - dead. In her dreamlike thoughts she always thinks of Luke, but as soon as reality sets back in, she goes back to realizing that she's probably never going to see him again, dead or alive. Orwell seems to keep the whole idea of Luke in the dark throughout the text, and even at the conclusion, the reader still doesn't know a lot about him, who he was in relation to Offred, or where he ends up.

1 comment:

  1. Read this one carefully... there's a big typo; I think we do know his relation to Offred though -- I like the point you are making here just the same

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