Cat

The Cat appears only in Offred's recollections of the time before Gilead, never as a living creature in the present of the narrative. Yet within those memories it carries a weight far beyond its brief appearances, serving as a touchstone for the domestic world that has been annihilated and, most crucially, as the occasion for a small but devastating moral compromise that foreshadows the larger violence to come.

Identity and Domestic Presence

In Offred's remembered life, the cat was a familiar, unremarkable household presence. Offred recalls that when she was sick as a child, her mother had to stay home from work, and the cat was part of that earlier domestic landscape. Later, in her own apartment with Luke, the cat rubbed against Luke's legs, mewing plaintively for food. Offred once kept a cat herself, and remembers the "dead mice we would find on the doorstep" that the cat offered as gifts—a detail that Aunt Lydia's classroom lecture about the "dead rodent" mouth of a mouse triggers in Offred's mind. The cat also appears in a memory of the apartment Offred shared with Luke before their daughter was born: in a dream, Luke is there, looking down at the floor where the cat rubs against his legs, mewing for food, and Offred asks how there can be any food when the apartment is so empty. These scattered images build a picture of a life in which a cat was simply part of the fabric—fed, loved, taken for granted.

The Night of Departure

The cat's decisive role comes on the night before Offred, Luke, and their daughter attempt to cross the border. As Offred walks through the rooms of their house, trying to memorize the arrangement of their life together, Luke puts his arms around her. "The cat, is what he said." Offred, who had not thought about the cat, suggests they could just leave her outside, but Luke points out that she would hang around and mew at the door, and someone would notice they were gone. Offred then proposes giving her to a neighbor, but even as she says it she sees how foolish that would be. Luke says, "I'll take care of it," and because he says "it" instead of "her," Offred understands he means kill. "That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real." Luke finds the cat hiding under their bed—"They always know"—and goes into the garage with her. Offred never asks what he did. She sits in the living room, hands folded in her lap, and later reflects that she should have gone out with him, taken that small responsibility, or at least asked him about it afterward so he did not have to carry it alone. "That little sacrifice, that snuffing out of love, was done for my sake as well."

Thematic Significance: Forced Complicity

The killing of the cat crystallizes one of the novel's most disturbing insights: that oppressive systems force their victims to become complicit in their own diminishment. Offred recognizes that the act of killing—first in the mind, by turning a living creature into an "it," then in reality—is a template for the larger violence the regime will inflict. "That's one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself." The cat's death is a rehearsal for the losses that follow: the loss of her daughter, of Luke, of her name, of her self. It also marks the moment when Offred first understands that survival may require her to become someone she does not want to be. The cat's hiding under the bed—"They always know"—suggests an animal intuition of danger that the humans, caught up in their desperate planning, have failed to heed. In the end, the sacrifice proves useless: they are betrayed anyway, stopped at the border, and the cat died for nothing. This futility deepens the tragedy, making the cat not only a symbol of lost domestic innocence but also of the way the regime's cruelty radiates outward, contaminating even the most private acts of love and care.

Connections to Other Animals

The cat is not the only animal in Offred's memory that carries symbolic weight. She recalls the cat who gave birth on a plaid blanket before being spayed, and the smell of that birth—"Smell of matrix"—returns to her during Janine's labor, linking animal and human reproduction in a world that has reduced women to breeding vessels. She also remembers the cat who offered dead mice as gifts, a memory triggered by Aunt Lydia's mouth and teeth, which Offred compares to "dead rodent." These associations weave the cat into a larger pattern in which animals serve as mirrors for human vulnerability, instinct, and the violence that permeates both the natural and the social order. Offred even wishes, in her reduced circumstances, for a pet—"a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar. A rat would do, in a pinch"—but the house is too clean. The impossibility of such comfort underscores the barrenness of her existence in Gilead, where even the desire for a living creature to care for is denied.