Theme analysis

“’I'd like you to play a game of Scrabble with me,’ he says.

I hold myself absolutely rigid. I keep my face unmoving. So that's what's in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago. My mother had a set, kept at the back of the hall cupboard, with the Christmas tree decorations in their cardboard boxes. Once she tried to interest me in it, when I was thirteen and miserable and at loose ends.

Now of course it's something different. Now it's forbidden, for us. Now it's dangerous. Now it's indecent. Now it's something he can't do with his Wife. Now it's desirable. Now he's compromised himself. It's as if he's offered me drugs.

‘All right,’ I say, as if indifferent. I can in fact hardly speak.”

 Magaret Atwood uses a modern everyday tool, and makes it extraordinary in chapter 23 of a Handmaid’s tale. She creates a sense of danger in playing a game of “old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas.” This makes the reader understand the society that they live in more, as well as help them realize what the society has done to their humanity. It has forced them to play these games in the dark of night, so that no one will know. She uses a simile in comparing scrabble to illegal drugs that help the reader understand the danger associated with the game. Atwood also uses an anecdote of the main character to help the mood soften saying that it was a normal occurrence before this strange, and drastic change.