what role does nick play in the handmaids tale?

Nick is sitting in a career centre. He is talking to a counselor, Andrew Pryce, when he gets in a fight with another customer. Nick is thrown out, Pryce follows him and invites him out for coffee. Nick tells him about his brother, who is an alcoholic and often disappears for extended periods of time. Pryce expresses sympathy for Nick, and tells him about a religious group he is part of called the Sons of Jacob that wants to “clean up” the country. He offers Nick an invitation to a meeting and even alludes there may be a job in it for him. While Nick does not respond verbally one way or the other, future events demonstrate the choice he’s had making made. (revised by Nayra Coley on July 16, 2020) [2]

Inverse.com goes on to mention how way back in the Season 1 episode, “Jezebels,” we learn how Nick was recruited into the radical conservative group that overthrew the government. After getting into a fight at a job centre, the counselor follows him to a coffee shop. That counselor is Andrew Pryce, later Commander Pryce, who tells Nick about the Sons of Jacob and its efforts to “clean up” the country. The group later orchestrates a massive attack on Washington D.C., killing scores of lawmakers and officials and suspending the U.S. Constitution. In the Season 3 episode “Household,” we learn that Nick served in the Crusades, meaning he likely participated in this bloody coup. (revised by Walter Green from Grande Sao Luis, Brazil on December 23, 2021) [3]

Litcharts.com also describes how the Commander’s driver and Serena Joy’s helper in the garden, and Offred’s lover. Nick’s official position is Guardian, and he seems to be low-ranking because he hasn’t been assigned a woman. From the beginning, he roguishly rejects some of Gilead’s strictures (by rolling up his uniform sleeves, for example), but the Commander and Serena Joy find him trustworthy and get his help for their own misdeeds. He is secretive and discreet, and Offred can never quite figure out what he’s thinking, even during their love affair. The question of his true alliances comes to a head at the book’s cliffhanger ending, but the postscript “Notes” suggest that he was working for the Resistance after all. (last edited 11 days ago by Malachi Shelley from Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine) [4]

Elisa Jones from crossref-it.info, mentions how when Nick winks at Offred, it means ‘he’s just taken a risk’, but Offred wonders whether he is in fact an Eye, a member of the Secret Police, in which case the wink may have been ‘a test, to see what I’m would doing.’ At the very end of the last chapter (before the Historical Notes), Offred – and the reader – still does not know whether Nick can be trusted or not, and whether Offred is being taken to torture and death or to the start of an escape route. The very existence of the tapes, which must have been made after the events they describe (there were no facilities to make them in Gilead), suggests at first that she’s doingoing escape – but, as Pieixoto points out, they could be a forgery. So we can never be sure of Nick’s role. [5]