What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood created :: English Literature

What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood created these impressions? Give detailed evidence for your answer - The Handmaid's Tale What impressions have you formed of the narrator? How has Atwood created these impressions? Give detailed evidence for your answer The narrator of 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a woman who calls herself Offred. This is not her real name, but a name that she has been given by the particular husband and wife she is staying with. This makes the narrator seem mysterious, and Atwood creates this impression by not telling us the narrator's real name. From the very start of the novel, Offred has given me the impression that she is quite well educated by the way she speaks and expresses things 'like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out'. This type of simile, which she uses also, gives us the impression that she isn't very happy about her surroundings because she is using violent expressions and associating things, which are supposed to be quite pleasant to things that sound very disturbing and of a violent nature. 'Clouds like headless sheep', normally clouds are associated with bright fluffy marshmallows and pleasant things like that, but the narrator sees the clouds in the sky as disturbing images. All of the way through the book she uses simile's like this to compare normal looking objects or people. 'The smile of blood' is the phrase she uses in chapter six, when she is describing the men, which are hanging on the Wall. The phrase 'The smile of blood' is referring to a stain of blood which has seeped through the white cloth which is covering up the mans face, and she is saying it appears to look like a smile which a child has drawn. This seems disturbing because smiles are meant to represent happiness in people, and she turns that happiness sinister with saying it is a smile made of blood. Also this phrase makes us think about why it would be a smile, rather than and unhappy face, because of him being dead. These violent associations certainly indicates to us that the narrator is unhappy, and that is exactly why Atwood created that quality about her, so that we know that Offred is not happy about the situation she is in at all, and that she relates to violence a lot of the time because she is used to seeing violence going on around her. At the very start of the novel the narrator was continuously slipping in and out of the present tense, she would often talk in the past