The Handmaid's Tale | Characters

As in her previous novels, Atwood has chosen a first-person female narrator for the story of the plight of a state "handmaid" reduced to a strictly biological destiny. The reader knows the narrator only as "Offred” in keeping with the Gileadean practice of renaming handmaids as the property of whichever commander they serve at the time (hence "Offred" literally means "of Fred"). Like other Atwood protagonists, Offred begins her narration in a state of psychic numbness, determined to keep from thinking about the nightmarish circumstances of her life. Having become a handmaid following a...

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