Life and Death in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

"In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Did Luke hope?"

This excerpt from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, in which protagonist Offred has been removed from a "normal" life and flung into a dystopia in which she is forced to have sex for the sole purpose of procreation, presents a parallel to the way in which Offred treats, or has been trained to treat, those from her past (her husband Luke, her daughter, and her friend Moira). By suggesting the paradox of a corpse, a lifeless and unmoving body, hoping for something she introduces the idea that Luke may be both dead and alive completely relative to her perspective and her choice. She illuminates the disturbing condition of the ignorance that society has thrust upon her; all she has now is a pervaded and misinformed personal rationality--if a corpse can hope than Luke can hope, but Offred only knows that there is an undefinable and unreachable "if". The reader realizes that Offred invests a concrete comfort in these thoughts and it is both saddening and frightful to know that the only thing that Offred carries from her past life is an abstraction, and metaphor, and conditionals; all she can do is hope.
She alludes to a semblance of camaraderie with Luke, or her abstraction of him; he is both dead and alive and so is she, lost to society's regime and an inability to define herself. And she has an inability define Luke and an inability to define death. Offred remarks earlier in the novel that in her previous life she felt alive and that her feeling of vivacity was worth the risk of death and of death's implications. The analyzed quote makes it seem as if this is why Luke can waver fluidly between those two worlds, or why anyone from her past can make that transition. The Aunts, in training, told Offred that it is easier to imagine these figures as dead, to suppress any hope that they may be alive. But for Offred, such states exist simultaneously; and her hope is the only thing, for her, that strengthens the world in which her lover, her daughter, and her friends reside. Her difficulty is in choosing; which would she rather hope?