The Notebook

The spiral notebook Zeb gives to Toby in the chapter titled “Weeding” symbolizes Toby’s sense of loss and nostalgia for the time prior to the fall of humankind. The notebook Zeb gives Toby has a depiction of a two children, a boy and a girl, playing together on the cover. Toby looks at the cover and thinks of the past, and the past drawn on the notebook cover represents an idyllic past of how things were prior to the plague. The sense of nostalgia Toby feels is connected not necessarily to a personal loss but loss associated with losing something that was taken for granted. In using the notebook as a symbol, Margaret Atwood seems to suggest that the legacy of human history is taken for granted as something permanent, and Atwood aims to write against this assumption by showing a world in which...