Bread by Margaret Atwood: Multiple Viewpoints

In “Bread,” Margaret Atwood takes a concrete object, bread, and views it through multiple lenses. The story has five different sections, each that asks the reader to think about bread in a different way. In the first section, Atwood conjures actual bread before the reader by undermining her own directions — first she asks the reader to “imagine a piece of bread” then she says, “you don’t have to imagine it, it’s right here in the kitchen,” and describes it. Atwoods descriptions and the second person narrator drop the reader into the story’s reality. With the concept of bread feeling concrete, Atwood moves on to the metaphorical meanings of bread in three short sections that present the privation of bread and its moral, psychological, and symbolic repercussions. The final section returns to the first and addresses the complications that the interior sections set up.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.

While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry.[1][2] Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age.[3] Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.