t is too late for Offred, but it is not too late for the reader in a free society to be awakened and ready to fight at every step the efforts of those who would steal our freedoms for their own evil purposes.
For Atwood to accomplish her purpose, she must create a protagonist with whom the reader can identify. Atwood is not writing an adventure story designed to merely excite and entertain the reader, to provide background images for a lazy vacation read on the beach. Writing in the middle of the Reagan era and the rise to power of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right, Atwood wants us to be painfully, fearfully and ragefully aware of and ready to fight the gradual erosion of rights and freedoms around us, as Offred was not. The reader must deeply empathize and sympathize with Offred for the author to accomplish her aim. And it would be a hard-hearted reader who would not immediately identify with Offred, her current situation of imprisonment, and her long
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