Cora and Rita press through from the kitchen. Cora has begun to cry. I was her hope, I’ve failed her. Now she will always be childless.

The van waits in the driveway, its double doors stand open. The two of them, one on either side now, take me by the elbows to help me in. Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.

The last 3 paragraphs of the Historical notes are:

Did our narrator reach the outside world safely and build a new life for herself? Or was she discovered in her attic hiding place, arrested, sent to the Colonies or to Jezebel’s, or even executed? Our document, though in its own way eloquent, is on these subjects mute. We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. 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.

Applause.

Are there any questions?

But after the technical end of the narrative, Atwood wrote these fake “Historical notes on The Handmaid’s Tale”, which are supposed to take place some few hundred years after the events of the book, like a fake lecture. The last sentence of that is: “Are there any questions?”– that’s technically part of the book as whole, but the end of the actual narrative is the first one I gave you.

Study Guides:

These links will give you a summary of the book, character analysis, plot and much more, so that you will be able to answer literary questions.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-122.html

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/

http://www.novelguide.com/TheHandmaid’sTale/

http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/handmaid/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid’s_Tale