e, would ever want to lose their rights to be human. They had no freedom to read, walk, talk, love, need or feel. They switched from being a people who could use power to attain freedom, to people who had no freedom to attain power. Actually, freedom and power are exactly what Gilead did not have. As Offred came once from her daily walk with her "twin," she looked at the bodies hanging on the Wall and mentioned what she felt as ". . . blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel" (44). However, it was not as if people who occupied higher ranks than she did possessed the right to feel which had been neglected to her. In this society, everybody controlled everybody, so that each individual had their own practical function in the system, preventing anyone from having power. An example of this is how Offred's function is seen through her own eyes. As she was taking a bath and noticed the tattoo that had been made on her ankle to guarantee that her function is not forgotten by others, she thinks to herself, "I am too important, too scarce, for that. I'm a national resource" (85). This is what everyone is in Gilead, a resource, and Offred is possibly the most important.Obviously, there are differences in our present society to the one preceding Gilead. Presently, our government could never be overthrown without millions of Americans crying out. Nor would it be possible that someone kill the president by simply entering his house. The problem is that these differences mean little when there are also many similarities. The purpose Atwood saw in her book is to warn us of our own dangers, not to compare them to a fictitious story and keep ignoring things. As I said before, I do not think we will ever have such an awful transformation in our lives, but I do not think something similar is impossible to occur. Because we are all being blind, like the other society was blind, and we ignore things like violence, we are building ou...
