The Hand's Made Tale: Approach The Book Closely

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Question 1.
Atwood gives us the names of the divisions of the novel to help us approach the book closely and carefully. The names of the sections are the environments where the activities in the novel occur. Examples of these are ‘Night’, ‘Waiting Room', ‘Nap' and ‘Shopping' among others. With these mentions, we get to understand the setting of the novel, for example, in the introduction, at ‘Night', the persona was in a room that had once been used as a gymnasium, with a wooden floor and stripes and circles painted on it. The author says, “A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell”, in what seemed to had been a basketball pitch where players would play in whereas people sit around and spectate (Atwood 1).
Secondly, to help us approach the novel in a more understandable manner, the author, in the introduction, gives us the time that the activities in the novel were taking place. She implies that the initial activities occurred in the past and that this was in a form of a story of what they had already gone through. The tale, to be specific, states that the persona, together with her friends or whoever, were being held in some kind of a facility where the conditions were, agreeably, not as good as it should be. The place was cold and they slept on the floor. They were not allowed to talk and that is why they communicated in whispers, and there were individuals guarding them as wardens and patrols, whom they called Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth.
Thirdly, the introduction elucidates the themes that are present in the novel in order for us to get first hand information of what was happening in the setting. When the author writes “Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts”, we get the notion that this is a dystopian feminist ideology novel where the female gender is in the position of leadership (Atwood 2).
Question 2.
To clearly set the tone of the novel, Atwood uses three epigraphs. The first one is a quotation from Genesis 30:1-3, the scriptural love story of Jacob and Rachel. In the story, Jacob had offered to work for seven years in the farm of Laban in or...