Real from Fake

The section that caught my attention instantly during my reading was on page seventy-four of The Handmaid’s Tale, where Luke, Offred, and her daughter are making an attempt to escape to the border. Throughout the reading, we hadn’t known what had happened with her daughter and Luke, and while we did have some snippets here of the two we did not have much information in regards to who they were. This was the first time that we had figured out what had happened to the three, and created a lot of foreshadowing for the future. ¨Luke is there, behind me, I turn to see him. He won’t look at me, he looks down at the floor, where the cat is rubbing itself against his legs, mewing and mewing plaintively. It wants food, but how can there be any food with the apartment so empty? Luke, I say. He doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t hear me. It occurs to me that he may not be alive.¨ The first thing that came to mind was if Luke was really dead? Throughout the story we can understand that the handmaid has a pretty negative tone throughout, essentially expecting the worst, we understand this in different scenes like the one where she is shown a photo of her daughter and she instantly assumes she is dead, but how can Luke be dead? Is she remembering things wrong? Usually people do not die standing up right, in fact it’s probably impossible, but in this scene the reader can understand that he is standing up right, or probably is. Then in the next page, at the bottom it says, ¨The bell wakes me; and then Cora, knocking at my door.¨ Now this is really confusing, was the ¨memory¨ from before really a memory? Is that what happened to Luke? I feel like including that it was a dream rather than a memory had made me initially question the two. Often, when we get snippets of the Handmaid´s life in the former world, it’s usually in bed where she claims she’s either imagining, but is she imagining? Or is she just dreaming? I think something interesting about this story is that it’s hard to distinguish between the two and what’s really happening. Some parts may invalidate others, while others may validate them. This makes me still question what happened to Luke and her daughter, were they really caught crossing the border or was there more to it? Similarly, later on page 85 the Handmaid gives another story regarding her crossing of the border. ¨When we get to the border, we´re just going over on a day trip; the fake visas are for a day. Before that I´ll give her a sleeping pill so she´ll be asleep when we cross. That way she won’t betray us.¨ One thing that initially shocked me is that this is a completely different story from the one before, Luke is in the car not in the apartment with the cat. She is taking her car rather than swimming, why? IS this also a dream? I think the narrator makes it hard to distinguish to make the reader more immersed with the handmaid. THroughout the story, the Handmaid has a difficult time distinguishing between her imagination, her dreams, and what has actually happened. In which she would often make clear to the reader that she is remembering wrong as if she’s the one reading. In this case, the reader cannot understand once more which one is the real story. This also reminded me of the story we read at the beginning of the class, ¨Beginning¨ by Marget Atwood, where she would once again make different versions of the same story, so it makes me question how much of the Handmaid’s stories and memory of the past is honest rather than imagine and hoping that one or another happened, or maybe they are all the same story. Its really conflicting and I think the conflict that the author causes by giving us different stories to fill in the same gaps is what makes this story really immersive. We´re practically in the Handmaid´s mind in the sense that we cannot distinguish between fake and real, the same way that the Handmaid cannot. Another good example of this is the scene in which Moira escapes, she has no way to prove that this really occurred. She just happened to hear it through other people. In fact, for all she knows Moira can be already dead, but the Handmaid is hopeful for the ones she loves.