Authors portray social issues that are sensitive to the public by placing them in their literary works in order to display their importance. Authors such as Atwood and Roth utilize this technique in order to bring forth social issues that deal with race, gender, love, religion, and other issues that people are scared to discuss. These authors bring these topics to light through the use of vivid imagery, detailed characterization, and a well developed setting. The main issues that are touched on in each of these text are social identity, religion, and love.
Social identity is not only the biggest issue within our society but it is the one factor that drives The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Human Stain by Philip Roth. Atwood and Roth use an immense amount of characterization. The major characters of each book both deal with some issue that stemmed from some other issues socially. In The Handmaid’s Tale …show more content…
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood demonstrates the effect of loneliness on the main character Offred. Everything and everyone that she has ever loved has been taken away from her. She is lonely and has no one. She often thinks about her husband and daughter, and how life was before everything changed. She misses the times when they would hold each other and love one another. The worst thing a person could suffer from is being lonely. A person can survive without sex. Sex is not a necessity for life. Neither is love, but life is better when you have someone there to support you and be there for you. A person who lacks love has a higher chance of being depressed, and depression kills. This is demonstrated when she says, “But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from. There’s no one here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere” (Atwood
Social identity is not only the biggest issue within our society but it is the one factor that drives The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Human Stain by Philip Roth. Atwood and Roth use an immense amount of characterization. The major characters of each book both deal with some issue that stemmed from some other issues socially. In The Handmaid’s Tale …show more content…
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood demonstrates the effect of loneliness on the main character Offred. Everything and everyone that she has ever loved has been taken away from her. She is lonely and has no one. She often thinks about her husband and daughter, and how life was before everything changed. She misses the times when they would hold each other and love one another. The worst thing a person could suffer from is being lonely. A person can survive without sex. Sex is not a necessity for life. Neither is love, but life is better when you have someone there to support you and be there for you. A person who lacks love has a higher chance of being depressed, and depression kills. This is demonstrated when she says, “But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from. There’s no one here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere” (Atwood