Posed at the end of the novel in the form of an author’s appendix, this coda provides a framework and tongue-in-cheek historical perspective for Gilead’s story. Atwood’s abrupt shift in tone to witty repartee and punning benefits the work in several ways:
· Self-important, supercilious academic humor lightens the intense and chilling conclusion to Offred’s eerily bland recorded narrative.
· Details revealed in Professor Pieixoto’s speech extend some hope that she found her way to a Bangor way station and had enough time and freedom to locate a tape recorder and narrate her experiences in Gilead.
· Additional facts indicate that the theocratic repression found in Gilead also existed in Seattle, Washington, and Syracuse, New York.
· The method of ordering and communicating historical data in Offred’s day authenticates and legitimizes memoir and diary as indigenous literary outlets of oppressed women.
· The incongruity of recycled tapes by Elvis Presley, Boy George, Mantovani, Twisted Sister, and Lithuanian folksingers heightens the comic departure from Offred’s dire situation. Also, the implications of each musical performance carry their own freight of meaning: Elvis, an idolized superstar and sex symbol; Boy George, a British rock singer who cultivates a bisexual image; Mantovani, a name synonymous with hypnotically bland elevator music; Twisted Sister, a heavy metal rock group whose name echoes Gilead’s perversion of womanhood; and Lithuania, a former free state subsumed by the Soviet Union in 1940.
· The nauseating political correctness of Pieixoto, who hesitates to side with Offred’s account of murderous oppression in Gilead.
