The Burning of the Magazines
“I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash, in the air, before my eyes.” In this short excerpt from “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Offered is remembering a time when she saw her mother and her mother’s friends burning magazines. What strikes me most about this section is the choppiness of the writing. When explaining how the magazine burned, she uses commas after every few words. When I read this, it reminded me of those flip books; the ones made up of images on paper that seem to move when quickly flipped through. What was the author, Margaret Attwood’s intention of doing this? I think it might reflect how Offered is forgetting her old life and that the world she used to know is slowly fading and becoming a series of still pictures that she can only look back on with little memory. The use of short descriptive words could also be reflec...