Comparing Narrative In The Handmaid's Tale And Capital Letters '

This is the power of narrative, it evokes feeling, leaving responders sometimes in their comfort zones, and sometimes out of their comfort zones as well, in order to demonstrate the composers ideas and claims. It is characterised in its ability to inspire, entertain, persuade, and inform. Every culture has defining stories, stories about who we are, where we came from, how we got here and what we believe. These stories about group identity and cultural transmission encapsulate values, goals, customs, beliefs and morals in society. Academic Samantha Vice claims that we “impose a narrative structure on the world”, that is - we see narrative as our lens in which our lives are experienced. This claim that narratives are influenced by experience can be detected in the work of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Omar Musa’s Capital Letters (2013), where both composers demonstrate the importance of narrative and its ability to …show more content…
Elliot, where they both use the imagery of smoke encompassing an enclosed area to represent that story can ‘fill’ community, they can unify people. Atwood uses the metaphor, “palimpsest of unheard sounds” to exemplify how “meanings that are produced by the actions of reading are a function of the past”, in other words, composers read to write. A palimpsest is writing material in which the initial copy has been erased or overturned to make way for a new edition. This relates to community and their effect on composed texts, and suggest audience control contributing to a subjective meaning.

Musa’s repetitive use of literary connections such as “an alphabet of exiles”, “the silver cursive” and “calligraphy” all attempt to build metafiction through the integration of how narratives should be expressed. This perspective allows the community to empathise with him thus, acknowledging the validity of his claim. Similarly, Atwood uses her characterisation of Offred to explore metafiction through her