Offreds Narrative - What is the purpose and function of the Historical

Offred's Narrative - What is the purpose and function of the Historical Notes and how do they assist your interpretation of the novel? The historical notes are not part of Offred’s narrative, they are a transcript of a symposium held at a university in 2195 – two hundred years from where we left the end of Offred’s harrowing tale. The purpose of these notes if any, is to put Offred’s narrative into a historical purpose to help these academics understand the life of Gilead. It seems to me that another purpose of these historical notes is to provoke a very strong reaction in the readers who have followed the emotional journey with the narrator Offred. The significance of the university name ‘Denay, Nunavit’ is that Atwood took the name from a group of people called Dene from Canada’s North west territories and they are about to become the first self-governing group of North American native people in an area called Nunavit. Atwood has chosen names such as Maryann Crescent Moon and Johnny Running Dog for the professors suggesting that the native Americans overbear the academy which strongly contrasts with the white male-dominated patriarchy in the Gilead times in this future world Atwood has made the white males become the vulnerable subjects of a study and nit the dominant rulers and scholars they once were. Also the name of the university sounds like the sentence ‘Deny None Of it’ suggesting that Offred’s story was all true despite what my be said or not said in the historical notes. The purpose of the lecturer that Atwood created Professor James Darcy Pieixto is to give readers a masculine view of Offred’s story which is ironic due to the domineering and powerful roles that the males played in Offre... ... see themselves progressive but hold the seeds of patriarchal oppression. With Pieixto’s appeal for some understanding feelings toward Gilead which was then followed by an applause this also suggests such moral ambivalence getting ready for such future evils. Another purpose for these notes is also to show how academics miss the point completely when looking at some historical facts and Atwood shows an example of this with these notes, how people can be sending out the wrong message and doing false teachings. The finishing sentence â€Å"Are there any questions?† gives the story a deliberate open-ended conclusion, here I think Atwood wants readers to discuss or at least think about the message she has just shown us, that the end of The Handmaids Tale is only the beginning of a discussion of the issues raised in the story, of what will our world finally become?