The Handmaid’s Tale question

There seems to me to be very little reason to NOT trust Offred. The historian at the end obviously has her own agenda, but it seems to be more of a narrative device to provide context than much else. Is there something I've missed in my many readings to make me not trust Offred's narrative?

Now I may have to read it yet again. It always scares the hell out of me. Especially now in this debit-card world. Spooky, Margaret, spooky.

I wondered that about the historian's account at the end of the novel. I wondered whether it was accurate and objective or was it something akin to "Christopher Columbus discovered America" revisionist history.

I do not think offred is a coward, for sure she is no hero, rather she is everywoman or everyman. She wants her freedom but is petrified of taking the necessary risks. She submits to the authorities of her time, as do almost all of us in every age and society.

Naughty Margaret.

Slow, masterful, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (still) works like a striptease, dropping clues like garments to be followed into our narrator’s — a woman known as Offred — cramped reproductive cottage, her henhouse, her life. Here sterility is only surpassed by eros and draconian rules barring the ineluctable: human nature. Looked at coldly, the falling petals of Tyler’s first-person narrative appear to be the work of a novelist feeling her way forward, as if discovering furniture in a dark room. The novel’s revelations are fuel but not impetus for the reader. This is no page turner.
Maybe this was one of those books that wasn’t plotted out, which is not unusual. Or maybe the author discovered how to tell her story as she wrote, which is commonplace. In any case, it doesn’t matter if this book grew from an intuition that formed to an idea and developed as it grew. An adept author covers these tracks by making them feel like tracks. Had Tyler plotted out the book on a white board years before scrawling it across the page, it would have proceeded in the same fashion, should have proceeded in the same fashion, drop by drop, sign by sign, intimation by intimation, patterning finally into recognition.
Here is a book that’s become a classic, one considered an act of high art, distinguished literature in a vast middle-brow genre. And The Handmaid’s Tale stand up there with Orwell and Huxley, and Atwood’s prose blows away the competition.
But while conceding the book’s greatness, I’d argue that Atwood buried the lede (correct classic spelling). Of course, had she not buried the lede, the book might have faltered forward into the lesser genre of thrillerdom. Too bad. I don’t want to forgive Atwood for plunging us through tens and tens of pages of vagary.
Offred’s struggle would have benefited from a little scene setting. Instead, her story is frittered out in a fog. And that’s a violation. From the first, Offred knows the story, knows what’s going on the world she writes about, but she refuses to come clean.
The author, using Offred as a hand puppet plays Punch and Judy with the reader’s sensibilities. If Offred knows her world — despite the clouds that seem to obscure her memory (and where did those clouds come from again? Brainwashing?) — then why doesn’t Atwood provide us with the thumping drama that would have exploded from a little sign posting at the entry, the lede.
I would argue, as I have from the first, that the writer is reporting on her character. Atwood has no idea what’s going to happen next as she writes. And while she’s finding her way forward, she’s hiding behind her character’s imposed weaknesses. It’s not Offred who has to figure out her world. She know her world. Atwood doesn’t. Atwood uses Offred’s hand to feel her own way forward through the dark halls of composition.
She should have done a rewrite.
Understand. I would recommend this book in a heartbeat. I would not argue against its brilliance or the majesty of Atwood’s prose, but I will say the narrative is fundamentally flawed. Not fatally, but fundamentally.
Had the book begun on the last “notes,” which is to say the final chapter inserted under the title Historical Noters on The Handmaid’s Tale, then there would have been magic. The true spirits of drama would have been loosed. The book would have become a page turner, because actual tension would have infused the narrative, as opposed to Offred’s stingy and occasionally tedious revelations.
Go on, Offred, you’ve lost a daughter. Where’s your rage, where’s your spit, your venom? All you’ve got is your repressed memory, the fog of PTSD? Perhaps. That’s what Atwood would have us believe. Which is why she leaves her character to be diminished not just by her degenerate world, but by her feeble reaction to it. I can buy into that, but I won’t praise it.
I don’t want to revise the Tale. But I do want to scold Margaret Atwood for having wasted her precious prose on a simpering coward, damaged goods, when she had the opportunity to tell a soaring story simply placing the lede at the front of the book where it naturally belongs, as opposed to burying the lede in the garbage of a post mortum, entitle Historical Notes on…. Humbug.