Offred is the main character of the story- a word which she uses with relish as it is the only thing that gives her power. To her, life in the Republic of Gilead, a state occupying the present-day USA that has stripped the intellectual privileges and rights of women for the honorable sacrifice that is re-population of the human race, is inherently a literary reconstruction. It is in her yearning for the past, her contempt for the present, and her belief in dual possibilities, one markedly realistic and the other idealistic, that she finds the tenacity of life.
