ory to us, the mind and conscience we must identify with, is Margaret Atwood's intended hero in the story. As a result of the apocalyptic themes throughout the story, a hero must be in place to embrace the end, whether it be a positive or negative one. Offred fills this position with great expertise. She suffered through the oppression, through the trying times, and she was in a situation which provided a window into the government repression, and, the ways around it. The novel, in my opinion, was interesting, yet a little hard to follow. The way the narrator randomly skipped from present to past and back to present made the story line seem drawn out when in reality, it was not. I did enjoy the plot, however, probably not as much as a devout feminist would have. The book was obviously targeted towards women, myself not being one, so I didn't quite get the entire gist of the book. I did think it was well written, however, and I enjoyed the parallels it shared with Orwell's 1984. The many different aspects of the novel, the many different angles that it takes for purposes of explanation and clarification make it difficult to categorize. Some categorize the book as science fiction, others label it thriller fiction, while others still dismiss it as feminist literature. The book has been broken into determinants, which are important to the success of the story. These include existential apologia, oral history, speculative fiction, confession, and dystopia. Existential apologia is a defense and celebration of the desperate coping mechanisms by which endangered women survive, outwit, and undermine devaluation, coercion, enslavement, torture, potential death sentences, and outright gynocide. Like Zhukov in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Offred clings to sanity through the enjoyment of simple pleasures: smoothing lotion on her dry skin and smoking a cigarette with Moira and her lesbian sisterhood in...
