The document under-study consists of an excerpt taken from the novel entitled The Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. It is the first chapter of the novel. The text can be divided into 3 parts: in the two first paragraphs, the narrator remembers that she -with her inmates- has once been sleeping in a gymnasium in which she had a lot of memories: she remembers all the activities that had once been hold there but something had already changed at the moment when they were sleeping in the gymnasium. In the third paragraph the narrator and her inmates appear to be like prisoners: in this gymnasium where she once has yearned for future, they have been treated like prisoners. Actually we do not really know if they are being held there because they are prisoners or if it is in order to assure their protections. However at the end of text, the reader can see the narrator and her inmates have been reduced to whisper to communicate between them: consequently the world, in which they are, seems to be a prison. As a reader, we are not really aware of the period when the scene takes place. We can only make assumptions: for instance, we can gather that when she was still a teenager, she lived in the U.S. that would correspond to the second part of the twentieth century with television, etc. But when she is sleeping in the gymnasium, she lives in a world where something seems to have affected the U.S.: the army-issue blankets where we can read U.S are old ones. How does this excerpt appear unconventional as a novel’s beginning?

The topographical elements of the text create a ghostlike atmosphere. The scene takes place in a gymnasium, and this one is precisely described by the narrator, however we do not really know anything about for what this place is being used to. The language creates an ambiguity: everything seems to have been said by the narrator but nothing can be said about the place in which she sleeps. The words used in order to describe