How Does Margaret Atwood Create Tension In The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary tale about a future that abandons technology for more primitive ways of living; but adding in things the reader cannot imagine, The book touches on many different controversial topics, a few being feminism, the loss of literacy, religion, class, environmental issues, and politics. This book should be added to Literature in English II, because it contains literary elements that have been covered in class, add diversity to the course, demonstrate postmodern era characteristics, and stress the importance of reading and writing.
The Handmaid’s Tale starts off with a women being held in a high school gym with many other women (it can be assumed that there are at least

While she is there, her duty is to have emotionless, un-erotic intercourse with the Commander, with Serena Joy sitting right behind her while it is happening. This ritual is called “The Ceremony” and they go on until the handmaid can conceive a child for the Commander. For obvious reasons, tension exists between Serena Joy and Offred. At the beginning, Offred’s relationship with both the Commander and his wife is strictly business. This relationship changes when the Commander summons Offred to his office one night. Expecting the worst, Offred nervously goes to his office, only to find out that all he wants to do with her is play Scrabble, but eventually their relationship turns sexual. This is a surprise to Offred, because women are not even permitted to read, let alone have a personal relationship with their bosses. While all of this is going on, Offred’s thoughts become more and more resistant to the ideas of her society. She finds a friend in her shopping partner, Offglen, who is part of a resistance group. After Offred thinks she has found an ally in this crazy world, one day she discovers she is assigned a new shopping partner; she later finds out that the old Offglen has committed suicide. Simultaneously, Serena

According to Nownovel.com, an unreliable narrator is “a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value” (nownovel.com). Much like Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, our narrator is unreliable simply because she is ignorant of what is going on. She is isolated at the Women’s Center and at the Commander’s house, so she has no idea of what is going on in the outside world. After she gets captured, she has no knowledge of the whereabouts of her husband and daughter, so therefore the reader will not know this either. By using an unreliable narrator, Atwood creates a sense of mystery and suspense, because the reader never knows exactly what is going on outside of the Commander’s house, other than Offred’s previous knowledge of the world of Gilead. One of the most stirring lines in the book is: “Maybe I really don’t want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge” (195). Not only is the reader left in the dark about things going on in the country of Gilead, they are also unsure of who the narrator even is. The reader is only shown the story in the present, with glimpses of the past in the form of flashbacks. In the Historical Notes at the end, the future historians that were studying her story said: “Our author, then was one