compare the ways in which the writers of your chosen texts present unreliable narration

Thesis

• Both Atwood and Shelley utilise unreliable narrations to highlight subjective truth

• Atwood, writing amid growing tensions between differing political viewpoints, uses unreliable narrations to critique unchecked ambition

• Shelley, influenced by the propaganda of the Cold War era, uses a fragmented narrator to illustrate how trauma and censorship can distort memory

• Perhaps both authors aim to shift the readers from a passive to an active role

both highlight subjective truth

HMT = subjective truth on religion

Frank = subjective truth on nature

AO1

• HMT

  • roles in society = commanders, wives, handmaids, angels, eyes

  • ‘all flesh is weak. all flesh is grass, I corrected her’

  • ‘God made them that way but he did not make you that way’

  • ‘forgive them, for they not know what they do’

  • ‘blessed are the meek. she didn’t go on to say anything about inheritying the earth’

  • ‘blessed are the silent. I knoew they made that up’

  • epigraph = rachel and leah

• Frank = creature narrative vs victors

  • ‘such a thing that Dante could not have conceieved’

  • ‘wretch’ ‘miserable monster’ ‘demonical corpse’ ‘half extinguished light’

  • ‘the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity’

  • ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel’

  • ‘I was benevolent and good, misery made me a fiend’

  • ‘shall I respect man who he condemns me’

  • ‘did I request thee, maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?’

AO2

• HMT

  • juxtapostion

  • biblical allusion

    • grass = Isaiah 40:6

    • blessed = beatitudes

  • declarative sentences

  • significance of subordinate clause

  • metaphor

• Frank

  • pronoun ‘it’

  • grotesque imagery

  • hyperbole

  • metaphor

  • rehtorical question

  • eloquent language

  • unreliable narrators

AO3

• HMT

  • cold war surveillance

  • feminism

  • politics and religion

  • rachel and leah

• Frank

  • noble savage

  • rousseau

  • paradise lost

    dantes inferno

AO4

HMT AO3

• cold war surveillance

• feminism

• politics and religion

  • Reagan emphasised conservatism and his belief in family values alluding to the traditional, heterosexual, nuclear family

  • he appealed to the white working class americans who felt racist resentment against the advances that black people had made during the civil rights movement

• rachel and leah

  • It is a teaching from the book of Genesis that forms the basis of the relationship between Handmaids, Commanders and Wives.

  • It sets up sanctioned adultery within marriage as long as the goal is to have children.

Frank AO3

• noble savage = stock character that embodies a ‘native’ or ‘outsider’ who has not been corrupted by civilisation, symbol

• rousseau = His theory was that people begin life as innocents, and may become corrupted/evil over time due to culture and society

• paradise lost

• dantes inferno = It is an allegorical story about the human soul’s journey to God, depicted as a harrowing, guided tour through the nine concentric circles of Hell

HMT = unreliable narration distort memory

Frank = unreliable narration critique ambition

AO1

• HMT

• Frank

AO2

• HMT

• Frank

AO3

• HMT

• Frank

AO4

HMT AO3

Frank AO3

Both = unreliable shifts audience from passive to active

AO1

• HMT

• Frank

AO2

• HMT

• Frank

AO3

• HMT

• Frank

AO4

HMT AO3

Frank AO3