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Margaret Atwood's Bread Point Of View

Decent Essays

Short fictional story, Margaret Atwood’s Bread (1981), emcompasses multifarious literary techniques, written in a confronting manner to explore and question the extent of the representation of realism. The multifaceted story contains perspectives encompassing a symbolic loaf of bread, conveying conflicting versions of reality through indifferences, thus positioning the assumptive privileged reader in belief of their own culpabilities. Furthermore, through examining the equivocal second-person narrative, Atwood experiments through narration, point-of-view and the use of stylistic devices in representing the ‘real’ within literature. Within Bread, Atwood alters the narrative voice and point-of-view to emphasise the importance of implicating the audience in the action and discomfort, thus using the realistic technique of representing the actual and ordinary experience reflecting the social world of the common reader. Within the first paragraph, …show more content…

You don't have to imagine it, it’s right here”(Atwood 40). By drawing attention to reader’s position, Atwood breaks down the division between the author and reader, reminding the reader of their privileged reality. In succession, two following paragraphs describe outlandish scenarios, assertively directing readers to question their reality by imagining the importance of bread in another of less fortune-“Imagine a famine” and “Imagine a prison”(40), with the narrator using omniscient power to guilt readers. In third-person, the narrator in the fragmented fourth paragraph distances reality from the reader-“This is a German fairytale”(40), thus alerting

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