‘Professor Maryann Crescent Moon’ – A unique name reminiscent of Native American culture, perhaps denoting a return to history, and acting in sharp contrast to the regimented ‘Of-‘ prefix names of Gileadean society.

‘As part of our Twelfth Symposium’ – Possible reference to Plato’s ‘The Symposium’, another literary work that seeks to explore the theme of love, first praising it and then defining it. Perhaps Atwood is expanding on a point she made earlier in the novel through Offred, that the regime was built without love, and was therefore tyrannical.

‘(Laughter.)’ – Highlights how as time moves further and further away from a given point in history, tragedy becomes indifference, and eventually, comedy. Everyone has fallen victim to mocking those in the past as we look back with the luxury of hindsight, establishing a point that Atwood develops in the final sentences of the novel.

‘Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.’ – I believe that this closing statement acts as an evaluation of the past, and perhaps even a criticism. As time goes on, do we get too caught up in the academia of studying history that we forget to sympathise with the oppressed?