A Study Of Narrative Strategies In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood is a famous novelist, poet and essayist in contemporary Canada. Her novel The Handmaid's Tale was printed in 1985, as soon as it published, this novel gained immediate success, and Atwood won her second Governor General's Award in the next year. This thesis based on Atwood's masterpiece The Handmaid's Tale, in order to analysis its narrative strategies. The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's the sixth novel. In 1985, it caused a sensation as soon as it published, and won"Canada Governor Award","Los Angeles Times Award""British Booker Prize"and"Bates - Paris - Hemingway Award". Most of the studies about The Handmaid's Tale are focused on its feminist and dystopian. The author thinks that the uniqueness of the novel's theme has closed relationship with its narrative style. So from the unique narrative strategy, the author attempts to study the narrative style, and then analysis its deeper theme which hidden in the novel.The thesis first starts with the unique design on time and space, and via the stream of consciousness to fold the past, present, and future together, presents the possibility of looming and appalling; the overlap between space and past are strongly projected out "today's degenerate and feelings. Between the space and time, writer leads us to examine: where human being should to go? The second part start with the point of the narrator, through the point of narrator, we can understand the struggles between the mental and physical as a victim. These struggles also represent"I say there I am, I say there you are". In such a society without the self, this is the only way to get them. Because "I" only have discourse in the story, and in the story she can confirm the existence of "I". The heroine is speaking, what she says is not the historical story about Gilead, but the woman memories of the past, which to recreate, express the past experience, is only a woman's life. In there, Memory is the only way to live with; people live in the memory, memory has become one of the important ways to confirm their self way. Narrative repetition is the typical feature for this novel in which the author intended to disclose the human sophistication and indifference by the means of scene repetition on night, watch, transcendence and representation. The same scene simultaneous and repeatedly staged, this design let the independent personality slowly disappear, in this dull scene, human nature has changed at the same time, it's the right changing give people hope in future. In conclusion, we can see that in Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale is not only in feminist and future society, but also more important in exposing the complex and evil in human nature. This complex and ugly is not just in different levels of people, and also between people who have the same fates. Interpersonal apathy and people lack of historical profoundly introspection is the root causes that the tragic history repeated staged. People should have a profound thinking from this.