While reading Oryx and Crake, I was fascinated by the narrative structure that Atwood uses to tell her characters’ story. At first, it was extremely confusing: it was difficult to tell the point at which Jimmy stopped and Snowman began. However, once I acclimated to this technique, I found it really interesting. After recognizing the differences between Jimmy and Snowman, I realized that pretty much every character has at least two identities, although they are not necessarily as clear-cut as those of the narrator. Crake is another such character, although his latter identity essentially overtakes the former: “Snowman has trouble thinking of Crake as Glenn, so thoroughly has Crake’s later persona blotted out his earlier one” (Atwood 71). Oryx is just as fragmented as Snowman and Crake, in many ways: “How long had it taken him to piece her together from the slivers of her he’d gathered and hoarded so carefully? There was Crake’s story about her, and Jimmy’s story about her as well…and then there was her own story about herself…There must once have been other versions of her…” (Atwood 114). Snowman himself seems attached to this idea that humans have dual identities. When presented with the character of Jack, the pornographer from Oryx’s childhood, he demands to know not just the name by which Oryx knows him, but “his other name” (Atwood 143). Atwood links the concept of identity with name, suggesting that a name has an underlying power to create one’s identity. She also interconnects the concept of self-identity with that of identity presented by others, implying that multiple stories co-exist within one person. However, it seems unclear whether or not these identities can actually co-exist. Are they, instead, exclusive?
Snowman and Jimmy seem to be one example in which two separate identities cannot co-exist. Instead, at the moment when he meets the Crakers, he decides that “he no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim, and especially not Thickney…He needed to forget the past—the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form” (Atwood 348). However, Snowman is unable to fully escape his past, even at the very end of the novel. The last page illustrates this as Snowman hears echoes from his past: “Oh Jimmy, you were so funny” (Atwood 374). Even at the very end of the novel, Snowman is unable to let go of his identity as Jimmy.
In contrast to Snowman, whose present identity seems consumed by that of his past, Crake’s past seems completely overwhelmed by his future. To Snowman, Crake’s past identity as Glenn is nothing more than “a disguise.” Unable to reconcile the persona of Glenn with that of Crake, Snowman claims, “The Crake side of him must have been there from the beginning” (Atwood 71). However, this idea of Crake’s latter identity as omnipresent clashes with Snowman’s own desire to reject and forget his past. Atwood seems to imply, through Crake’s persistent identity and Snowman’s own inability to actually forget his past, that identity is an underlying facet to one’s personality, something that cannot actually be changed.
The character of Oryx is an interesting mesh of identities, since her actual character seems rather vague throughout the entire novel. I found her identity especially interesting because she means so many different things to so many different characters. Snowman himself has an entire persona built up around the picture of her that he printed off from a porno site when he was fourteen, but Oryx seems unsure of whether or not it is actually her. At times, Oryx seems like nothing more than a construct, some sort of idealistic girl dreamt up by Crake and Jimmy when they were fourteen. The Crakers’ association with her does little to dissuade this image, since she becomes a sort of goddess in their minds.