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Not What You Meant?  There are 28 definitions for Tale.

The Handmaid's Tale Study Guide

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by Margaret Atwood
About 54 pages (16,188 words)
The Handmaid's Tale Summary

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Narration

The events in this novel take place at different points in the life of the narrator, but the primary setting, the present tense of the novel, is Gilead, where she has been a handmaid in the Commander's house for five weeks. The reader is introduced to new characters that she meets from this point forward, such as the doctor and the new Ofglen, while others that she is already familiar with-Rita and Cora for example-are taken for granted and woven into the narration without explanation.

Because the narrator's life had been designed by the government to be uneventful and to not require independent thought, the tone of the novel is drab, flat, desensitized. Information about how her life came to be this way is conveyed through flashbacks, most of them drawn from two sections.....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,045 words. This study guide contains 16,188 words (approx. 54 pages at 300 words per page).

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The Handmaid's Tale from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.



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