'Or in a park somewhere, with my mother. How old was I? It was cold, our breaths came out in front of us, there were no leaves on the trees, grey sky, two ducks in the pond, disconsolate. Breadcrumbs under my fingers, in my pocket. That's it: she said we were going to feed the ducks.
             But there were some women burning books, that's what she was really there for. To see her friends; she'd lied to me; Saturdays were supposed to by my day. I turned away from her, sulking, towards the ducks, but the fire drew me back.'
             In this extract, Offred is sharing a memory of her mother with the reader. Using the extract as a starting point, examine the ways the writer uses memories in the novel.
             One of the ways that Atwood uses memories in this novel is as a means of escape for Offred. In this extract Offred is remembering this moment because it shows lots of different things, one is that Offred's mother was an extreme feminist and that her mother took her to the park to burn magazines and other literature when Offred was told she was there to feed the ducks. This memory shows how back in the sixties feminists were too extreme in many people's opinion (although in my opinion had this not been the case they would have been ignored). Atwood uses memories in this novel to reflect on our own past and because the book is set in the future the book can also mirror our present (albeit in a more extreme form), which would have been Offred's past. From the given extract we can see that Atwood uses pathetic fallacy in memories to create feelings in a scene, 'no leaves on the trees, grey sky' makes the memory feel cold and dark and this is like an omen of what is to come - a bleak future. Also in this memory the child Offred, thought that her mother was there 'to see her friends' and that shows that as a child she had no political realization of what was happening at the time or wh...