This excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, shows Offred talking to the Commander about love and her thoughts and memories of it. In Gilead, no one loves anymore, love is just a memory. When Offred speaks in a tone that portrays her mixed views towards love. Atwood also uses diction to show that Offred tries to hide that she is actually talking about her own memories and past. She also uses strong comparisons and imagery to depict her feelings of loss as well as her feelings of relief and pain that love has given her.
Offred clearly depicts mixed views on love through her changing tone. She uses words like “lovely” to describe love, only to be followed with the word “dire” in the very same sentence. These two words are opposite in nature, yet Atwood chooses to use both to describe one thing. This shows Offred’s very ambiguous feelings toward love, not sure if it had caused more happiness or more pain. She describes love as “dumb“, but “amazing“; it was “precarious“, but her friends had been “evasive” about it.
As Offred tells the Commander her thoughts on love, she repeatedly gives examples using the words "you" and "we" rather than using "I". This shows that even though it is clear that she has experienced the things she describes, it also shows that she is uncomfortable with the Commander knowing these details about her. She doesn't want to make it seem like its her own stories, though we can already tell. The last paragraph of the excerpt contains a lot of emotion, and the questions Offred asks seem highly personal, though she uses the word "you" throughout this paragraph, in the last sentence "What if he doesn't love me?", she uses first person.
Love is compared to God and god is compared to Love.
Hey Ash!
ReplyDeleteIn your introduction I was confused by the sentence 'When Offred speaks in a tone that portrays her mixed views towards love'. What happens when she does that? Watch out for repetitions in your introduction: also uses… also uses. Overall I think that your introduction was well organized. Your first body paragraph was clear and to the point and I understood that it was about the tone used in the extract? The second paragraph however needs some clarification in the topic sentence since it isn’t clear to me if you were talking about tone, diction, imagery or comparison (all four are mentioned in your introduction!). An improvement to your commentary would be to talk about all four in your body part because the reader can’t guess the arguments that support your thesis statement. Your second paragraph might not have been well organized, but I must say that your point was very interesting. I like how you saw that she was uncomfortable, through her choice of words. Another aspect of the text that I found very interesting was the notion of falling. She mentions several times that Love is a Fall, that loving is falling, that they all fell in love. I discussed this further on my blog ( http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/ ), if you’d like to check it out. The last statement of your commentary has a lot of potential; you should have discussed it more in depth. A conclusion would have been an enhancement to your blog, even though it wasn’t necessary. Asim did a pretty good job in his commentary even though he did not write a conclusion either, take a look at it! http://asimlikesenglish.blogspot.com/
Good job Ash!