Atwood appears to blend her own persona with that of Offred as Offred expresses her regrets for the hesitations, distractions, and rapid-fire articulation of the preceding chapters. Offred’s tale, recalling the “fried food” heavy hours of incarceration becomes “a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force.” Atwood seems to apologize for the fragmentary nature of her fable, and her seeming intrusion as a pseudo-voice in the telling of Gilead’s agony is actually an artful method of bringing the story to its end. Like a true friend, Offred regrets “this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story” and hopes to hear the reader’s experiences, “if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place.”
The poignancy of Offred’s dehumanization echoes against the solid walls, both social and physical, that shut her out of personhood. To maintain a shred of sanity, she copes with madness through her affair with Nick and clings to a fantasized form of what Martin Buber refers to as the I-Thou relationship. “I believe you’re there,” she asserts, almost like whistling in the dark. “I believe you into being,” she admits. In torment, she confesses having sought sexual intimacy repeatedly as though “there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever.” With no moral precepts to guide her choices, Offred, a basically decent, monogamous woman, functions as best she can in the spiritual wasteland that Gilead epitomizes and blames herself for the fading of Luke’s image. In face of senseless barbarity and threat of physical and spiritual annihilation, she chants an existential mantra, “I am, I am.”
