lyrically and imagistically textured style draws attention to itself rather than offering a transparent medium of a knowable reality'. 90
In a typically modernist manner the slow horizontal progression in time which occurs in the novel is accompanied by a vertical movement into the characters' inner life. The reader becomes acquainted with the tragedies of Elisabeth's childhood and adolescence, the memory of which still continues to haunt her. We follow the subtle changes that Lesje undergoes as she becomes slowly aware of her involvment in Nate and Nate's personal anxieties and uncertainties.
This narrative structure results, on occasion, in abrupt shifts of focus in the narrative as the text attempts to register the characters' emotional reactions. One example is constituted by Nate, shortly after he has received a most amazing revelation from his mother. He is told that she has turned to political action not from hope but despair, as an alternative to suicide after the death of his father. The presence of his young daughters in the house provokes another bitter 'revelation'; he recognizes that one day they will leave him to 'live with surly, scrofulous young men' (p.287). The narrative register at this point changes quite 90 Gayle Greene, p.66.
abruptly to convey Nate's sense of lack and loss. The Image that Is created as a result Is reminiscent of Joyce's Leopold Bloom. 'Motherless, childless, he sits at the kitchen table, the solitary wanderer, under the cold red stars' (p. 287). The echo of the modernist text, Ulysses, reinforces the modernist focus in Life Before Man on the characters' inner lives and emotions.
The apparent lack of action in the novel at the level of plot is countered by the characters' changed perception of themselves and of their relations with one another. However, of the three protagonists, Lesje is the one most affected by change.
As her involvment with Nate progresses she starts to question her previous attitude to life, and the nature of her feelings for her ex-partner, William: 'She must have thought she could live with William for a million years and nothing in her would really be changed'(p.222). Lesje begins to examine what 'she means by being in love' (p.126). She used to think she was in love with William 'since it upset her that he did not ask her to marry him' (p.126). By contrast, her feelings for Nate make her discover the composite and 'painful' (p.222) nature of love. At first the 'simplicity', even the 'bareness', of her life with William was something Lesje welcomed. But, now, as she reflects, 'Nate has
changed things, he has changed William. What was once a wholesome absence of complications is now an embarrassing lack of complexity' (p. 126).
When she sees William after she has left him, the question that she is prompted to ask is whether he has changed: 'What she wants to ask him is: Have you changed? Have you learnt anything? She herself feels she has learnt more than she ever intended to, more than she wants' (p. 295).
As for Elisabeth, despite her active resistance to Nate's plan to leave her and move in with Lesje, she eventually recognizes that she welcomes the event. She realizes it will mean 'freedom' from the set of unspoken rules, established for the most part by herself, that life with Nate had come to represent
(p.206). She feels strong enough now, 'she does not have to depend' (p.140) on him. 'Despite the wreckage' (p.302) Elisabeth has a sense that she has salvaged something. 'She is still alive, she holds down a job even. She has two children ... she managed to accomplish a house...She's built a dwelling over the abyss, but where else was there to build? So far, it stands'(p.302).
These changes convey a notion of the self in a constant process of discovery. Nate, for example, strives to avoid what he perceives as the constraints imposed by other people's fixed definitions of
himself, 'he has spent so much effort to avoid becoming : his mother's son. Which may be he is./ But not only, not only. He refuses to be defined. He is not shut, time carries him on, other things may happen' (pp.305-6).
In the last section of the novel Elisabeth's imagination, prompted by the Chinese art exhibition which she has organized, is released by a fantasy of a better life. Her first reaction to the exhibition's catalogue was one of pronounced lack of interest. At the end, however, she surprises herself by noticing that she is moved by those pictures of happy peasants. She is aware that it is 'foolish. This is propaganda ....China is no paradise; paradise does not exist' (p.316).
However, she is also forced to realize how alone she has been for the past years, and she has a sudden vision of a connection with other people. She knows that 'China does not exist. Nevertheless she longs to be there' (p.317).
This dream of displacement constantly haunts the protagonist of Atwood's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale. Like many of Atwood's characters Offred is 'aware of finding herself trapped in the wrong place and with the wrong people'. However the world of personal relations explored in Life Before Man is painfully 91 Patrick Parrinder, 'Making Poison', p.20.
part of the narrator's past in Atwood's dystopia. The novel stresses the deprivation of personal
relationship imposed by the patriarchal oligarchy of the Gilead regime and the suffering it causes to the protagonist.
Like other examples of historiographic metafiction. The Handmaid’s Tale is a narrative 'that is intensely self-reflective art, but is also grounded in historical, social and political realities'.92
In a manner which is predominantly ironic. The Handmaid's Tale recalls both fairy tales and more canonical texts.9-* As mentioned in Chapter One, the use of intertexuality in Atwood’s dystopia involves a wide range of reference. It underscores the many themes that are so skilfully interwoven in the text. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, for example, and Zamyatin's dystopia We, are to different extents, parodically echoed and revisited in terms of setting, theme and narrative frame.94 Hawthorne's depiction of the destructive aspects of Puritanism in nineteenth-century New England is revised in The 92 Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, p.13. 93 Atwood shares Northrop Frye’s contention that ironic modes are the most appropriate ones for serious fiction. 'Northrop Frye Observed', in Second
Words, p .406. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scrip:. A
Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mao .
1976), p.134.
94 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism,