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The role of a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead is ultimately to breed, and nothing more. Cooped up in a nondescript room with nothing but her own thoughts and painful memories for company, the narrator, Offered, shows many signs of retreating further and further into her own world, and becoming slowly more unstable throughout the course of the novel as her terrible new life continues.



The most common and by far the most disturbing example of this is the use of imagery and symbolism in the book. Many everyday items and observations are likened to some kind of sickening or violent image, which indicate that Offered isn't really all that stable; for example a removed light fixture is described as being "like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out."



Other examples of this are describing a Guardian of the Faith's face as "unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab" and likening "half-dead, flexible and pink" worms to lips. A tourist's stiletto......

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Approximate Word Count: 1287
Approximate Pages: 6 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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