Hope 4

I find chapter eighteen in this story very interesting because it really talks about the idea of what the feeling of hope can do for a person. Offred is in a really horrible situation where all of her loved ones, and even her child, have been taken away. She is forced to work for a commander and basically be a baby machine for him and his wife. Offred is having a really hard time living in a situation like this, but through it all she does not kill herself to take away the pain. She spends a lot of time thinking about a man named Nick who turns out to be her husband before the government took over and separated them. She tries to think about his face what kind of clothes he was wearing and little things he did that would make her happy. She also thinks about her child she had with Nick that also got taken away from her when the government took over. I would think that thinking about these things all of the time would drive me crazy, knowing I will probably never see them again. Thoughts like that might cause me to loose hope in life and kill myself. However, somehow Offred creates stories about what happens to Nick even though she does not know for sure. She thinks these things and tells herself these stories so many times she forces herself to believe these things happened and that makes her feel a little bit better about the situation. The stories she makes up are about Nick and that he has either been killed and is laying in a ditch somewhere being left to die or other stories that he had got away and is running free and getting help from many people. Any way the outcome of the story is, by Offred making things up like this she is keeping herself sane. It seems like she had no closure with him because she does not know what happened to him after he was taken away. It gives her something to think about plus it gives her hope that her family is not dead.