Luke

Luke is Offred's husband from the time before the Republic of Gilead, a man remembered through fragments of domestic life, intellectual companionship, and the catastrophic failure of their attempt to flee. His disappearance—whether by death, imprisonment, or successful escape—is never resolved, and this ambiguity becomes one of the central engines of Offred's inner life, forcing her to hold multiple contradictory beliefs about him simultaneously as a strategy for survival.

Identity and Background

Luke was a man who enjoyed language and its curiosities. He once explained to Offred that "fraternize means to behave like a brother" and noted there was no corresponding word meaning to behave like a sister—"Sororize, it would have to be, from the Latin." Offred used to tease him about being pedantic, but she valued this knowledge. Before Gilead, they walked together through the streets of what would become the Commander's neighborhood, talking about buying an old big house with a garden and swings for children, a Sunday game they knew was unlikely but that gave them something to discuss. Such freedom now seems almost weightless to Offred.

Life and Plot Trajectory

Luke was married to another woman when Offred first knew him. She would arrive first at hotel rooms, checking in, pacing, waiting for him, dabbing perfume behind her ears. After he divorced and they married, they had a daughter. When the regime began to tighten—when women lost their jobs and their bank accounts were frozen—Luke tried to reassure Offred. He knelt beside her and said, "Don't worry, I'm sure it's temporary" and "You know I'll always take care of you." But Offred felt something shift: "I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me." She thought, "He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's, anymore. Instead, I am his."

The family attempted to cross the border with forged passports, a picnic basket in the back seat to disguise their purpose, and a sleeping pill for their daughter so she would not betray them. At the checkpoint, the immigration officer took their passports inside. Luke got out of the car to watch through the window, then returned too fast, reversed, and began to drive very quickly. They abandoned the car in the woods and ran. Offred remembers pulling their daughter through bracken, the sound of shots "sharp and crisp like a dry branch snapping," and rolling on top of the child to shield her. Then the edges went dark.

Relationships and Conflict

Offred's relationship with Luke was marked by intellectual play and genuine affection, but also by the structural inequalities that Gilead would later codify into law. When she lost her job and her bank account was frozen, Luke said, "You know I'll always take care of you," and Offred thought, "Already he's starting to patronize me." That night he wanted to make love, but she felt numbed. She thought, "He doesn't mind this. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it." This suspicion—that Luke might have found the new order comfortable in ways she could not—haunts her memory. Yet she also remembers him with tenderness: holding her hand in the hospital when their daughter was born, singing "Oh what a beautiful morning" in the car during the escape, driving a little too fast, the adrenaline going to his head.

Change and Ending

Luke's fate is never confirmed. Offred entertains three incompatible versions of what happened to him. In one, he lies face down in a thicket, his plaid wool shirt and leather belt and work boots the only recognizable remnants, a bullet through the skull. In another, he sits in a gray cement room, unshaven, his hair cut raggedly, his hands painful to move, not knowing what he is accused of. In the third, he made it across the river, reached a farmhouse, was taken in by Quakers, and is now in contact with the resistance, planning to get Offred out. "The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them must be," she says. "But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything." She keeps herself alive by believing in a message from him that may never arrive.

Narrative Role and Evaluation

Luke functions in the narrative as the primary object of Offred's grief and the anchor of her former identity. He is the person who knew her real name, the person with whom she shared a life that Gilead has declared illegal and erased from official record. His absence is the wound around which her present existence is organized. The uncertainty of his fate—whether he is dead, imprisoned, or free—forces Offred into a kind of epistemological desperation that mirrors the larger condition of life under the regime: the impossibility of knowing anything for certain, and the necessity of believing anyway. He is also a figure of moral ambiguity; Offred's memory of his comfort with the new order complicates any simple nostalgia for the past. He is remembered, mourned, and held in suspension, a ghost who cannot be laid to rest because his story has no ending.