For my Oryx and Crake presentation, I focused on how I saw Oryx and Crake to be like an updated version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and I wanted to go further in depth on this topic for my reader response. Some of this is kind of rehashing what I said earlier, so I apologize for that.

When reading Oryx and Crake, I kept thinking back to The Handmaid’s Tale. I haven’t read any Margaret Atwood novels besides these two, so I’m not sure if the similarities I saw between the two novels are actually trademark Atwood devices that she uses in all her novels, but I felt that there were some pretty significant similarities that tied the two novels together.

The first thing that jumped out at me was how both stories used the same narrative style. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, the main character, is currently in the future and spends the story both retelling her past and describing her present circumstances. In Oryx and Crake, Snowman, the main character…is currently in some future world and reminisces about his past while trying to survive in his current world. Both books use sort of a nonlinear structure to slowly unravel aspects of the story. In both cases, the reader initially does not know how the future world came about – this, along with background story on the main character, are slowly revealed through flashbacks. This nonlinear method of storytelling is a pretty jarring aspect of both novels and introduced intriguing dimensions to the story. It is interesting to first meet Snowman when he is in his adult years and then read about how his character developed through his flashbacks; the same goes for Offred.

The other significant similarity is the concept of both novels. In both stories, the main characters are set in a future world in which something terrible has happened to humanity. Atwood tried in both cases to make the formation of this future world as believable as possible. Of course, the future world itself of Oryx and Crake will seem extremely outlandish, but the characters behind this future catastrophe and the events that transpire all seem to be very rooted in reality. What Atwood does in both novels is analyze the current state of the world at the time that she’s writing the book and then try to make logical extrapolations from that current world. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we see a corrupt government take over Offred’s country and then transform it into a dystopian, totalitarian regime. This is a timeless concept, as the idea of a corrupt government laying waste to a country has been used constantly throughout literary history. The agent of destruction in Oryx and Crake, however, is biotechnology, which is why I see it as an updated version of The Handmaid’s Tale. Once again, Atwood is analyzing the current state of the world at the time that she’s writing the novel and speculating about where humanity could go from here with what it has. Technology has advanced significantly since the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale, and with the advent of biotechnology, humanity now has even more ways to screw itself up, which is what Atwood explores in Oryx and Crake. The future world of Oryx and Crake is much more dire than that of The Handmaid’s Tale because we are led to believe that humanity has simply been wiped out rather than subjected to a totalitarian government, reflecting the higher stakes of today’s world. Thus, in the end, I saw Oryx and Crake as Atwood returning once again to analyze the world and give us her take on what we currently have and where we could go from here.