race/gender/science fiction - Oryx and Crake

oryx and crake vs. handmaid's tale

surrealistic — Mon, 05 May 2008 05:33:15 +0000

Since both of these novels are by Atwood, I immediately began noticing similarities (and more often, differences) between them when I started reading Oryx and Crake. The two greatest similarities seem to be: the meandering narrative style, which is not my personal cup of tea but is certainly better than being dry and dull; and the overall dystopian viewpoints of the books.

In the Handmaid's Tale, religious extremism is the big "Thing" that has moved the world from contentment into despair; and the most destructive product of that fanaticism is the subjugation of women. In Oryx and Crake, it seems that scientific development is the big evil at first; but when you look below the surface I think it's really corporate control OF science that it's trying to criticize. The Crakers themselves, with their "perfected" human genetic composition and general plasticity, seem to be the biggest example of this.

Crake is a negative personification of the ideal of progress...or rather he is what happens when someone gets too strongly behind the idea of always moving forward. While walking around Watson-Crick, he keeps pointing out different technologies and saying "wave of the future" or "the latest"I found it so interesting that Crake is also basically programmed with a disrespect for life by playing violent video games, watching live executions, and another called "Extinctathon", which while it doesn't directly contribute to mistreating the environment, perhaps encourages it? Yet, I didn't find myself hating Crake; rather feeling intimidated that he is the future of our planet...the progress-blinded, drunk-on-technology non-human with no respect for the earth, or no need for it.

I suppose one could notice that both novels are decidedly heterosexual, and do not really explore non-traditional gender relations, but sticking to a few strong topics almost makes Atwood's critiques more effective.

Evolution

greenhedge — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:50:45 +0000

I just wanted to discuss the significance of Crake's decisions on how to modify humanity. It seems to me that, while his modifications were aimed at eliminating strife, the main result of his modifications were that he eliminated the part of humanity which causes strife, the main things he did was to eliminate the human capacity for progress. This emerges in his discussion with Jimmy about sex. Jimmy argues that by eliminating sexual frustration, he is eliminating art. I think this actually applies to nearly all human endeavors, including government, science, commerce, etc. Crake even confirms this indirectly by saying something like, wouldn't you always rather be fucking? He ultimately implies that if there wasn't a sexual urge to make yourself more attractive, you wouldn't do it, and art, and by extension all other human endeavors I mentioned, wouldn't be made. By limiting this capacity of humanity, it seems that he is dooming humanity to the same fate as the rest of the animals.

Religion is frustratingly necessary

dreamfall17 — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:11:08 +0000

Crake constructs a new genetically engineered human race to live more "in harmony" with the earth and each other by removing the human propensity for violence, meat-eating, religion, etc. etc. Unfortunately, a lot of those are a more intrinsic to the human makeup than Crake originally guessed. The Crakers are alone, in a world they can no longer understand now that Crake has taken science away from them. The only connection they have with the old world is Snowman, so naturally they go to him for answers. Snowman becomes their guru, their demigod, who in turn raises Oryx and Crake to the status of gods.

Oryx and Crake, through Snowman, provide a greater truth and reason for the Crakers than they can access with their own senses. The three members of the old human race can answer questions for the new ones. It is a natural, essential part of any conscious being, this need to find these answers. I remember reading a Newsweek cover story when I was in high school â€“ which was apparently a long time ago, because I can't find the article anywhere on the Internet â€“ on the theory that the need for religion is hard-wired into our genes. We can't help but want to believe in a greater power, though in the modern age that "greater power" can be science, as well as a god/dess.

Actually, I suppose that the above claim is a hard one to prove, given that the only (proven) conscious beings we know about are us, and having a sample size of one is not a particularly accurate way of drawing conclusions. However, a being that does not want to find answers to the unknowable world around it cannot possess curiosity, and a being without curiosity will not learn and will not have any new thoughts, and a being that does not think and learn can hardly be conscious. So, as someone said in class yesterday, the only way Crake could have defeated the need for religion would have been to replace humans with a new race of monkeys. So, conscious beings need answers. Since the Crakers do not have hard science to provide these answers for them, they have to start back where the ancients did â€“ with creation stories, fables, and myths, a primitive religion constructed around father and mother deities, Crake and Oryx.

Unfortunately, religion comes along with a whole bundle of less savory things, as history has proven time and time again. The Crakers will become more passionate about their deities. As the religion becomes more and more complex, discrepancies will arise (look at how simple the original difference between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites was), which will lead to argument, which because of the passion behind it will lead to hate, which will lead to war, with which comes the need to construct a hierarchy (someone has to win, which means that a whole bunch of someones will be better than a whole bunch of other someones). And, we're back where we started, basically, except now there are a whole bunch of little herbivores running around destroying each other, and the world with it.

Jimmy's life pre-apocalypse serves as a way to remind us of how difficult, how impossible, it is to live without some kind of higher power to look up to. For a child, their parents are the end-all, be-all â€“ I know when I was a kid, at least, whatever my father said was absolute truth, and anyone who said otherwise could go suck it. (I don't think I would have phrased it in exactly that way when I was seven, however.) Jimmy's parents are too transparently flawed for Jimmy to be able to look up to them, to be comforted in the knowledge that they are looking out for him and protecting him always. The accounts of his early childhood are saturated with pervasive feeling of loneliness, reminding the reader of how natural that need is, and how desolate it feels to be without it. When the childlike Crakers ask Snowman for answers, therefore, it is all the more understandable for the reader. It's nice to feel like there's some sort of reason and plan behind all this nonsense.

PS I hope that grace days count for the blog, too, because I totally used mine for this post.

mythologizing SF in o&c

ahnadibrawr — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:57:26 +0000

The author of an article I read for my term paper writes that SF and myths operate similarly. Both are a reflection of man's thirst for knowledge about his origins and his fate; SF is considered a more self-conscious form of myth-making. This is especially prevalent in Oryx & Crake, during those instances when the Children of Crake ask Snowman to tell them creation stories. Oryx and Crake are likened to Godlike beings: "Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself" (96).

Snowman, in this story, represents the last remnants of mankind, though at times, he loses sense of who and what he is/was. I thought it was interesting that the female Children of Crake were disturbing to Snowman. "They're every known colour from deepest black to whitest white...each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs...They look like retouched fashion photos" (100). In other words, these women are "perfect." Despite their perfection, Snowman does not find them sexually attractive. As cliche as this may be, flaws individualize people and make them special; imperfection gives more personality to a face than perfect symmetry does.

These women are too perfect. "These new women are neither lopsided nor sad: they're placid, like animated statues" (100). The Children of Crake are too well created for this post-apocalyptic environment. They may look human, but they aren't human.

A Different Post-Apocalyptic Lifestyle

FomaFan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:14:37 +0000

While Snowman, as many people have pointed out, has a very grim life ahead of him, I found James Cole's life in 12 Monkeys considerably more disturbing. He experiences just about everything that could go wrong in a dystopian future: his life is manipulated by far more powerful people, he loses his grip on what is real and believes himself to be insane, and ultimately becomes a witness to his own death. As with many time-travelers, he is ultimately helpless in the past even though he has such extensive knowledge of it; Cole's story employs the Cassandra myth to find tragedy.

The final tragedy of the film occurs when Cole realizes that his recurring dream is linked to his childhood, and that as a child he witnessed his own death at the airport. Here, even his personal memory of the past has failed him, and his life takes on a sort-of ouroboros configuration, where his final moments are taken in by his childhood-self, who will then go on to perform exactly the same actions decades later that will place him in the airport again. As finales go in time-travel movies, I think this is one of the most effective and disturbing tragedies possible; while time-travel movies may end up with the hero having to sacrifice himself to maintain the timeline (e.g. Donnie Darko, Terminator 2), here the character condemns his life to an endless cycle of helplessness and tragedy. We naturally think of time as linear, which is what makes time-travel movies such fun escapism; when the hero dies at the end, in some ways this returns us to a linear conception of their timeline, with a definite beginning and end. Here, Cole does not leave us with this satisfaction, and the murkiness of his timeline (and sanity and top of that) is unsettling, effective, and a unique comment on time-travel's complex effect on the lives of its users.

terrible humanity

dragongrrl — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:45:59 +0000

What ended up sticking out to me most while reading Oryx and Crake was how little good was attributed to the human race ("homo sapiens sapiens" [Atwood 99]). It was rather strange that despite hearing the story from a human's point of view, from Snowman's reflections on the past, the reader is presented with quite a terrible view of humanity. One of the first things that was mentioned was about one of the questionable games Jimmy and Crake would play: Blood and Roses, Blood representing the terrible deeds people have done in the past and Roses representing human achievements, like literature. But as Jimmy points out, "it was easier to remember the Blood stuff" (80) This could be because humans have a tendency toward remembering shocking things, violent things, atrocious things more than mild and pleasing things. Alternatively, it could be because there truly have been more Blood events in history than Rose events. In either case, humanity is not represented in a very appealing light.

Then, of course, there are all the sites Jimmy and Crake surf amongst for entertainment when they are still teenagers: the "Noodie News" (81), "Felicia's Frog Squash," "hedsoff.com," "alibooboo.com" (82), "shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com," and "nitee-nite.com" (83). The Noodie News is just kind of silly, with all the news reporters reporting while naked, but the other sites are not very pleasant. Felicia's Frog Squash is about exactly what it sounds like, and it is not alone it its type. Even more gruesome are hedsoff.com and alibooboo.com, where one can watch live executions and stonings from Asia and the Middle East. Similar sites representative of America are shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com, where, strangely, the men getting executed make a big show for the known viewers while the few women are killed in a very solemn affair, as if reminding everyone else that this punishment should not be entertainment. But the website that takes the cake, as it were, for showing how ridiculous people are is nitee-nite.com, where Jimmy and Crake can watch assisted suicides. The event is turned into a grand affair, and Snowman later reflects that "killing yourself was something you did for an audience," and if he did it now, with no one around to see, the act would be without "elegance" (344). Since when is suicide an elegant affair? The ease with which movies are made and uploaded onto the Web seems to have prompted everyone to go after their fifteen minutes of fame--sometimes in less thoughtful ways. Using suicide as a way to finally get noticed seems to go quite against the point, and truly all of these sites portray the rather shallow side of humanity.

Of course, Crake is not shocked at this, and himself views humanity with not a little contempt. "Monkey paws, monkey curiosity, the desire to take apart, turn inside out, smell, fondle, measure, improve, trash, discard--all hooked up to monkey brains, an advanced model of monkey brains but monkey brains all the same" (99). While great minds of the past have often raised humanity on a pedestal above all other animals, Crake has a more cynical, and probably more realistic view of human capabilities. Our being basically monkeys is not necessarily a bad thing, though it is a blow to our ego to think that we're no better than animals when as a society we have believed this for quite a while. But Crake doesn't stop here; he sees so many imperfections and unnecessary evils in humans that he believes will soon destroy us that he creates an entirely new species that is so much better. Gone is hierarchy, religion, all the bad that has ever surrounded sex. Many of Crake's instructions to Jimmy/Snowman about taking care of the Crakers include watching out for emerging human traits, like developing art and symbols, because these are supposedly a sign of evil to come. Truly, I think this depressing view of humanity is encapsulated in poor Snowman's thought when describing his name: "He's kept the abominable to himself" (8). He feels that while he teaches the Crakers, he must keep his central human-ness away from them and not influence them to become just like the race that Crake had so despised.

Isn't Crake a Savior?

CountZero — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:34:30 +0000

It seems to me that Crake believes that in order for the human race to survive, it has to become essentially non-human. He is doing what he believes is necessary to save what he considers to be the best parts of humanity. Barring the methods by which he achieves it, I think that it is interesting to examine this motivation as it stands, outside of the context. Personally, I do not agree with what Crake considers to be the best parts of humanity, just as I don't agree with Butler's argument that the "hierarchical impulse" is entirely bad. Just like Butler would remove this impulse, Crake removes the qualities that make the crakers able to joke â€“ "For jokes you need a certain edge, a certain malice" (306).

Fundamentally, I don't think that human ambition is a bad thing. Ambition is what has allowed us to pull ourselves out of lives that, no matter how idealized, were still nasty, brutish and short. Ambition is what has given us all the technology, all the power over the natural world that we now enjoy. Ambition requires self-interest, it requires that little bit of malice that makes jokes possible. I don't think that we are human without ambition, and I think that the most damage that Crake inflicts upon the idea of Humanity in the Crakers is his removal of the entirety of their ambition. They don't want anything more than what they have. With that attitude, what will they ever create?

So then the question becomes: Is Crake's way the only way for the human race to survive? Is there something inherently suicidal about the way that we act? I believe that Crake saw it this way, and was tormented by his vision, even if he would not admit it to himself. When Jimmy visits him at Watson and Crick, he hears the dreams that Crake has every night, and the terror that this inflicts upon him (218). I think that this scene brings (ironically) a real humanity to Crake. He is struggling with his decision, whether he wants to admit it or not

Crake, in the end, is not more than human. His creations are not perfect, no matter how far from human he has pushed them. By the end of the novel, they have created an effigy of Sandman, and are thus implied to be on the way back to humanity (361). Crake's last gesture is not godly, or superhuman, but simply another act of hubris, assuming that he can distill humanity into its most perfect parts.

I think this idea is central to why it is difficult to classify him as good or evil. We know that we are imperfect, as part of the human condition. Improving upon this condition must be something noble. If it assists in our ability to survive, and it can be applied to the entirety of humanity in one fell swoop, then isn't Crake a savior? This impulse conflicts with our ideas about making fundamental changes to our humanity in order to survive. Is it worth it? Is there something intrinsically noble about the human condition as it stands that should not be modified, no matter the benefits? Even if we pull Crake's decision out of the necessity for the eradication of all living humans, it is still an impossible decision to make.

Oryx and Crake...Apocalypse or Rebirth?

Trix2000 — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:57:10 +0000

The central event for the novel Oryx in Crake is the advent of a mega-virus, named JUVE, which nearly completely obliterates the human population. All that remains after it sweeps the world are Snowman, aka Jimmy, and a bunch of "Crakes"...genetically engineered humans designed to live easily and peacefully. Oh, and apparently some other humans...but we don't find that out till the end (and book doesn't say much about them).

Anyways, the novel is divided into two distinct parts -- before and after this apocalypse respectively -- that are interwoven together such that we alternate between the past and the present Jimmy/Snowman. The "before" period shows Jimmy's life and work with Crake up until the virus, and the "after" Jimmy's (now called Snowman) life as the only surviving regular human (so he believes).

Description aside, one of the more interesting aspects of this event is the fact that a new species of humans comes out of it nearly alone. These Crakes are an interesting sort, and before the catastrophe were intended just to be models of how humans could be improved...and become self sufficient. However, Crake himself apparently had other ideas in mind and intentionally killed off pretty much all of the world's population in what appears to be an attempt to restart the human race...hence making the Crakes immune to his virus.

The question now: did he succeed in his aims? From what I can tell, Crake had some sort of conviction to fix the way humans lived and interacted with the environment. He viewed the current human society as wasteful, destructive, and violent....and he wished to change those tendencies. Case in point, the Crakes. Totally docile, self sufficient, and easily adaptable...these new "humans" were his attempt to create a perfect sort of race that could live in harmony forever. His virus was the method by which to remove the flawed humans to give way for new ones.

So did it have the desired effect? Personally, I would say yes....and no. Yes, he did eradicate nearly all humans and created a self-sufficient peaceful group of humans. Yes, his plans fell into place as he expected. NO, because of Snowman. Much as Snowman is only one human and will not reproduce...he still exists to propagate the old human way. He is still an influence on the Crakes, teaching them random things that they would otherwise not care for. Snowman's recollections and descriptions of the Crakes contrast jarringly...showing just how simple and almost animalistic they are. Perhaps this was the idea, but one could argue that this demeans humanity more than it improves it.

I'll put this simply. While Crake may have removed many of the flaws inherent to humans, he also removed most (if not all) of the things that make them truly human. Sure, they can talk and be curious about things...but will they ever discover, design, invent, be creative?

They have intelligence, but because of Crake it is put to no use.

Oryx and Crake: Once again, Science is Evil

katashitakashi — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:59:02 +0000

It's a common trope for fiction writers to hate science and technology. The idea that knowledge is a recipe for destruction is deeply rooted in the past, dating back to at least Prometheus' punishment for stealing fire from Mount Olympus. But the more blunt examples are those in the mad scientist category; the Frankensteins, the Jekkyl and Hydes, the Dr. Moreaus, the Lex Luthors, etc. By taking their pursuits of science to unethical extremes, these characters not only wreak havoc, but shame the entire concept of science. Never mind that technology is what has allowed human beings to survive this long, can dramatically improve the length and quality of life, and ( for the " first world ", at least ) has done so repeatedly; all it takes is one guy inventing one monster, and the whole fictional world slides into a Luddite bias.

Oryx and Crake is no different, with its dystopian setting founded on consumer technology run amok. Biotechnology has led to monstrous creations that probably would have led to antibiotic-impervious diseases, information technology and new media have resulted in instant and accepted access to the barbaric, and the resources of the world are dwindling rapidly. There is no suggestion that humanity is trying to improve itself, but merely sleepwalking towards oblivion. Meanwhile, the amoral genius Crake determines that the only way to save society is to replace it with a group of docile, intelligently designed primates with no concept of art or progress. Everyone else is apparently a lost cause.

Even if we don't get the Star Trek type view of technology as a faultless elixir for all of humanity's ills, it would be nice to see a more balanced viewpoint. Atwood is incredibly effective at pointing out the ways technology can be used for destructive purposes, but not so much at showing constructive uses for science. There is no entertainment of the idea that Crake's science could have saved humanity, merely that the damage that his predecessors did to themselves was irreparable. Apocalypse is a forgone conclusion.

The downfall of society in Oryx and Crake is ultimately not the fault of the technologies, but the people and cultures that abused them-- people like Crake, who hides his sociopathy behind his claims of empirical evidence. When a religion is criticized for the acts of a few fundamentalists, others are quick to point out that the majority of believers are decent, law-abiding citizens. Perhaps a large section of fiction writers need to apply the same logic to science and scientists?

Last Man Standing

LeoniaTavira — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:40:40 +0000

What I found most captivating about Oryx and Crake was the total sense of isolation that saturates the book. The narrative helps in creating this sensation of loneliness because the reader is kept ignorant of the most recent events of Snowman's past up until the very last pages of the book. As we go along, we have the two separate periods of narration â€“ Jimmy's childhood and family issues, leading to meeting Crake and school, etc. and then Snowman's present. As we get glimpses of Snowman post-apocalypse, we also relive with him his nostalgia and visit to the events of the past with each memory in chronological order. Until finally, Jimmy becomes Snowman and the two narratives find one another in time.

The entire book is narrated by Snowman, and aside from superficial insights into the characters of Oryx and Crake (and perhaps even the parental figures of Jimmy and Crake), his is the only point of view we experience throughout the book. When we see him react to creations like the ChickieNobs, we understand how to react. And in his adolescent period when he is playing games with Crake and watching bizarre porn and executions on the internet, the reader sees that there are distinct differences between our reality and his. While Snowman is not the most agreeable or inspirational character, the reader identifies with him, partly because we adore flawed heroes, but also because, honestly, he's our only choice.

The way Atwood depicts this type of post-apocalyptic devastation creates a truly haunting vision of the future, that is a little too easy to picture. The sensations of being abandoned by one's entire species can really be felt by the reader because the only characters we ever meet are in Jimmy's head and they are repeatedly made surreal and mirage-like. The Crakers only help in the most primitive way, appealing to Snowman's need to be with others, feel human touch, and to speak, to remember the words he used to worship (even though the Crakers have no understanding or context for most of them). Atwood beautifully conveys the emptiness that Snowman feels, realistically simulating the waves of semi-contentment and total despair at the reality of his situation. It seems to be a common trope of science fiction, but also the genre of zombie movies, to create a fiction in which the hero is alone, isolated, and facing the extinction of all human beings should he/she fail. In the film Resident Evil: Extinction, there is a similar landscape, dry and exceedingly hot, with supplies, food, and weapons rapidly diminishing while the enemy grows. Snowman's only enemies were hunger, madness, and the wildlife (including the marauding bands of pigs with people parts). Obviously, within the context of action films the main character, Alice, has superhuman characteristics and the audience knows from the start that she will triumph over her obstacles. Part of the appeal of Snowman is that he is Everyman, John Smith, a neurotypical, with absolutely no exceptional skills, no super-attuned senses of physical abilities and there is no certain prediction for his future within this miserable shell of the former world.

It seems particularly upsetting that there is no Hollywood resolution to this book, although it would be difficult to imagine how such a fictional space could have a happy ending. Even though the book ends incredibly abruptly, with many possibilities and questions for the immediate future, the resolution of the two stories into one at least provides a narrative closure and a degree of satisfaction with how the story concludes.

Crake vs. the Oankali

amandejoie — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:38:10 +0000

So, we very briefly touched on this in class today, but I was interested in the parallels between Oryx and Crake and Xenogenesis. Clearly, the biggest parallel was that the human race ends up wiped out and reformatted against its will, for its own good (or so someone claims). The narration of both novels takes place at least mostly in the immediate aftermath. The initial struggle for survival removes the capacity to act in the ways that initially caused the downfall of the human race, but in both novels, there's the suggestion that this fix is temporary, and the situation will degenerate in to what it was before. This shows up through the reappearance of guns in Xenogenesis, as well as the overall degeneration of the resister colonies into violence. In Oryx and Crake it manifests in the effigy the Crakers build of Snowman. Crake "programmed" them through genetic engineering not to have the capacity to create abstract art, because he thought it was tied in to a tendency to invent religion, and then to wage war. Even if he's wrong in making that connection, the fact that they do have the capacity create these abstract figures suggests that he may not have successfully removed more explicitly harmful human characteristics. "Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war" (361). Then the mass slaughter of humanity would have occurred for absolutely no reason at all. Both books present the "better" reconstructed human race as transient, suggesting that the efforts to fix us are futile.
I think the most important difference between the two novels is what happened before the restructuring of humanity occurred. Both the Oankali and Crake saw the destruction of the human race as inevitable, before it happened. Crake make a preemptive strike and he wiped the human slate clean before it imploded so he could impose his own perception of what humanity should be. The Oankali recognized the fatal flaw of the humans before the nuclear holocaust happened, but did not step in to prevent the damage. They waited out the inevitable death and destruction, and then swooped down on the planet and performed their human reformatting, and which point they could present themselves as the saviors of the human race, as they performed their biological imperative. They seem more like the vultures that plague Snowman as he walks across the newly formed wasteland than saviors.
So which is worse, the actions of Crake, or the inaction of the Oankali? Both are delusional in that they believe they are acting in the best interest of humanity. But Crake at least realizes to a certain extent that he may have gone a little too far. He can't let himself see his own creation. He put in an official standing order for Jimmy to take over if "anything happens" to him and mentions that at that point Oryx wouldn't be around either, suggesting that he planned his suicide long before the actual event (320). Some form of guilt or uneasiness had to have overcome his megalomaniacal tendencies not to get the satisfaction of watching his children flourish. The Oankali experience no such pangs of guilt, they are happy not to even leave any human akjai before Akin fights for that right. And though they did not orchestrate the mass murder of millions of humans in the same direct manner that Crake did, they certainly did nothing to stop it.
So I'm curious, who do you guys think is more nefarious? Crake or the Oankali?

Response 9

wooohooo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:41:31 +0000

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 wellâ€¦and then there was her own story about herselfâ€¦There must once have been other versions of herâ€¦" (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 Thickneyâ€¦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.