The Handmaid's Tale and The Great Gatsby

Adlai E. Stevenson once said, “…the truth is often unpopular…” Stevenson’s statement suggests that the reality of a situation is not always preferred by those involved. The actuality of a situation may be so harsh that people may not want to hear it or believe it. More often than not, people hate to hear the truth because it defies the better image that they have in their heads about the situation. Margaret Atwood and F. Scott Fitzgerald portray this quote in their novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Great Gatsby, respectively. I agree with Stevenson’s quote because this is the reason that people lie. People lie because they don’t want to hurt the other person or they have to keep a secret from someone. All of these examples are factors that make people lie. Reality is a hard concept to grasp. It may be hard for someone to understand the truth of a certain situation when they don’t want to believe it. This theme of the conflict of truth telling is displayed in the two novels The Handmaid’s Tale and The Great Gatsby. The dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is set in the near future, in a totalitarian Christian theocracy, which has taken over the United States government. The society takes place in what used to be a regular city in the United States that is now called the Republic of Gilead. The Republic of Gilead overthrew the democratic state and replaced it with a totalitarian state. Throughout the book, the handmaid’s only purpose in Gilead is to create children for married couples that cannot conceive on their own. The story is told from the point of view of the main character, Offred, who is a handmaid. She was alive before Gilead and is now a member of Gilead, so we can infer the differences between the two settings. The setting before Gilead was just the regular, democratic United States. Offred had a husband and one daughter whom she loved dearly. Now, she has lost all of that, and lives in a society where she is only alive to