The Story of Schism

The style in which The Handmaid's Tale is written is misleading. While at first, Offred recalls her recent past as Handmaid-in-training, she does not relate the past itself to the corruption of the state, but to her friendships and family. This might lend insight as to why her perception of reality is skewed, or rather, split. She tells to "you," which according to her was a necessarily amorphous audience, that in order to survive she must believe in all possibilities, thinking it an armor against further disappointment. It is for this reason that she gives multiple possibilities which to be plausible would have to occur in parallel universes; her husband Luke is both dead and alive, much like her daughter. Instead, she prefers to attribute her sorrowful existence to the present, realizing on some level, that the present would soon end. At one point she unifies the female race by saying that they were "revisionists. We revise ourseleves." In other words, her account is much more a memoir than it is a document. The ensuing epilogue-type has scholars examining the manuscript of the The Handmaid's Tale, looking at it as a historical commodity of "the Pre-Gildean era." Even after the infamous occurrences of the pre-Gildean age, Offred is still not understood by the scholarly men.  To the men, she was nostalgically informative. To the reader, it is hoped that he or she realizes that instead she looks toward the future blindly, not being able to see past the figurative night. It is up to the reader to decide what her fate may be.