In an earlier post, I reviewed The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. As in that post, I will assume you have read the book before reading this review, so beware of what the kids these days are calling “spoilers” below.
I just wanted to re-address one portion of the book after hearing a friend’s response to my original position. It is in regard to the Epilogue, and here is what I had originally written:
***While I liked the open ending of the book, I did not feel the epilogue was necessary. It seemed self-indulgent to me, but at the same time, easy to disregard as not a part of the real story.
My friend, Jason, responded with this:
I argee with most, if not all, of your points. I think the epilogue, though, does serve a purpose: it shows that Offred’s world, too, shall pass. It’s also just another layer of desolate hopelessness, because now Offred’s story and world are forever etched in history via the written word. It reaffirms in a meta-textual way what we the readers already know.
Just in case you have not read the book, and are still reading this post (I warned you!) let me give you a quick snapshot of this controversial epilogue. The story ends with Offred either being taken away to jail (or worse) or rescued, we aren’t sure which–it’s open ended. This is followed by the epilogue which takes place in the distant future (I can’t remember the exact year) but we are are to assume it is decades, if not centuries, after Offred’s time. It is written in the style of a transcription of a lecture, complete with notations of where audience applause/laughter/etc occurred. Imagine a freshman history lecture at Random University, and you get the gist. The topic of this lecture is the society of Gilead, and more specifically Offred’s tale–where it was found, what it was recorded with, how it was recovered and authenticated, etc.
This whole epilogue bothered me because it seemed like a let down; a gimmick. It seemed to me that Atwood was trying, with a fictional postscript, to bolster the impact of the original story by trying to make it seem “real”. So struck was I with this opinion, that I didn’t pursue any exploration of any other motives the author might have had for writing it. Jason took something entirely different away from this extra-ending, valuing it as a teaching tool used to drive home a socio-political lesson. Looked at this way, I totally get the importance, and could then even take it even a step further: a commentary on the dualism of history. While history seems to repeat itself (Gilead as Old Testament, Take 2), it is also doomed to never survive. All man made cultures are evolutionary by nature and cannot remain rigid, or they will fall. It also made me think that while Gilead struck me as hell on Earth, no sustaining culture/government is ever all good or all evil. Gilead was part communist, part Lord-Tenant, and part capitalist, and unfortunately they just took all the wrong parts of each.
Has my position changed on the epilogue, you ask? Yes, in terms of its relevance, but No in terms of my personal experience with the book. As I said in my original review, I prefer to focus on the personal dilemma, not the macro-social one, though I admit I was errant to discard the epilogue as “self indulgent”. Woopsies 🙂
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