This chapter, largely about boredom, begins with an interesting image and the use of synesthesia. The reader is to imagine the blank space between parentheses ( ), or “the long parentheses of nothing” (69), to explain her boredom during her downtime in the household. This typographical image, considered alongside the palimpsest in the closet and the pillow with the word “Faith,” can be thought of as a reminder that women are forbidden to read (though this may be a stretch). I’m also tempted to stretch this into Atwood using a meta-reference, bringing attention to the act of writing down this narrative, adding to the idea of the unreliable narrator. This would especially be a stretch since the narrative, to this point as we understand it, is Offred speaking to us in her own head. However, (spoiler alert) we come to find in the Historical Notes out that later academicians received these quasi-diary entries as recordings, which makes the synesthesia she uses make a little more sense as “meta-reference”: “Time as white sound” (69). A stretch of my imagination or not,...