Blog 4

If there's one thing I was intrigued about in chapter eight-teen of "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. It is our main character's (Offred) thoughts on what I believe to be her hope of getting about of Gilead, or just hope to live on in general. I see that one of the things she hopes for the most is love, to feel love again and to be surrounded by love. I know this because in the chapter when talking about love she says " But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex, It’s lack of love we die from " (pg 118 PDF) this shows her dependence on love. She doesn't just want it because it's nice to have, she wants it because she feels that she needs it to live. Now as far as we know there are two main things that she "loves" in the story, her child, and her father of her child, Luke. In this chapter it mainly focuses around Luke and what she thinks he's doing now, but it's not one story, it's three completely separate stories and she believes all of them at the same time. These stories are as followed. One story is that Luke is dead in a bush, and has been dead for a year and that he's just starting to corrode and rot away, she believes that he was shot three times, once in the head she hopes because it would be a painless kill. The next story she believes is that Luke has been captured and is being held prisoner or in isolation, he's in a constant state of being tortured for information the Offred doesn't know about. He's old but still alive and every body part hurts. On a happier note the last story is that he was never captured by the soldiers of Gilead, that he made it to the river and that he was rescued and taken in by the Quakers, a rebel organization against Gilead. She hopes that this exiled government excises, she has to the news has proved it. She also hows that one day she'll recieve a message from Luke, but it will arrive in an unusual way.