In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood uses several literary devices to tell a story about the consequences of technological innovation, social inequality and environmental destruction. Atwood mainly relies on flashbacks to reveal the past, while also showing certain events that may have a role in the present day dystopia. Chapters 1-5 we mostly encounter past events. We are able to obtain a perspective on what their world once was. People were divided into compounds and it depended on their corporate affiliation and where they resided. Jimmy’s father was promoted from OrganInc Farms to the HelthWyzer compound. Their family moved from one walled compound to another. The “rejects” people who simply chose to live outside compound walls resided in the pleeblands which the compound people believed they were above. I noticed the amount of technological innovation that occurred during this time. There are a lot of genetically mutated animals, Rakunks for example. They were dabbling in new creations, upsetting the laws of nature, which Jimmy’s mother disapproved of.

What shocked me the most was Jimmy’s mother leaving, her husband and son. For me, that was unexpected. In Snowman’s flashback, his relationship with his mother appears to be complex. All we know is she was once a scientist just like her husband and for some reason she was no longer a scientist anymore. At first, I assumed the reasoning behind her departure was due to a mental health disorder. Jimmy spoke about her distance, her mood swings, how he’d try his hardest to get just a tiny reaction out of her. (33) Others refer to her as someone who was once smart. (25) He talked about her paranoia, after moving into the HealthWyzer compound. (53-54) Diving deeper into the reading, his mother eventually shared her disapproval of his father’s work and later fled. After her departure, Jimmy was left concerned and confused with unanswered questions, “why?” He was aware of her unhappiness but unaware of her concerns regarding the corporations and their part in genetic engineering.

I believe Jimmy’s mother leaving will set the tone of Jimmy’s future character. Being that his mother left him with unanswered questions, she also left him with distrust, and a void that he may desperately want to fill. His developing friendship with Crake for instance. Crake in a way seemed to be ahead of Jimmy. He was “more like an adult.”(69) Jimmy appears to admire Crake. His persona, and intelligence.(75) Although we are seeing the beginning of their relationship, this friendship in a way fills the void his mother left behind.

In the first five chapters of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood shows that the apocalypse is not caused simply by science or technology but rather by human fragility. People’s weaknesses—loneliness, disconnection, and the inability to question what feels “normal”—become the real reasons society collapses. 

We first meet Snowman, the lonely survivor of a ruined landscape. His daily struggles are small but exhausting: hunger, sunburn, and insect bites. What he clings to most is language, though even words begin to fade from his memory. This shows how fragile survival is when both the body and the mind are falling apart. Snowman himself is proof that the apocalypse is not only about the destruction of cities or systems—it is also about the fragility of the human being who tries to endure it.

Atwood then shifts to Jimmy’s childhood, pulling us back to a time before the world ended. On the surface, his society looks advanced and safe. He lives in corporate compounds where scientists create pigs spliced with human genes for organs. These inventions are treated as progress, yet they reveal how numb people have become. It’s rare that someone stops to ask whether this progress comes at a cost, and when someone does, like Snowman’s mother for example, they are portrayed as an outcast. This moral weakness—the willingness to ignore uncomfortable truths—shows the same fragility that will later destroy the world.

At the same time, Jimmy’s personal life mirrors this larger collapse. His parents are emotionally distant, his home is unstable, and he feels desperately alone. His small, private struggles reflect the bigger social ones: just as his family is falling apart, so is humanity. The connection between the personal and the global suggests that human fragility spreads outward. When people cannot face their own loneliness or act with care, society as a whole becomes too weak to survive.

By the end of chapter five, Atwood has already shown that the seeds of apocalypse lie in ordinary human flaws. The end of the world comes not from one sudden disaster but from countless quiet failures: failures to connect, failures to resist, failures to care. Snowman’s ruined present is simply the result of those weaknesses, grown too large to contain. In this way, the novel warns us that the greatest danger to civilization is not just technology gone wrong—it is the fragility within ourselves.

The contemporary crisis facing life on Earth right now cannot be reduced to a pin point issue such as climate change. Instead, they represent an accumulating amount of factors that play into it such as toxic chemicals in our environments, industries that strip the land and water, the collapse of ecosystems, and the loss of countless species. Together, these factors create a systemic breakdown that ripples across environments and societies, producing a detrimental state of instability. It is with this known context that Donna Haraway situated her reflections on the Anthropocene. She proposes the present moment is the inflection point of the Anthropocene. By examining the exhaustion of the Earth’s reserves and the loss of places of refuge for human and nonhuman beings alike, Haraway highlights both the severity of the crisis and the urgent need to imagine new modes of survival.

Donna Haraway’s reflections on the scope of Anthropocene, particularly in her work “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, begin with a question, “But, is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything?” (Haraway, Lines 21-22). Haraway insists that the crisis we face today far extends beyond just climate change. Furthermore she encompasses toxic chemical burdens, relentless mining, water depletion, and mass extermination of species as well as people. These systemically linked patterns threaten “major system collapse after major system collapse” (Haraway, Line 25). This opening alone frames the Anthropocene not as a singular issue but a collapse of one system that creates a chain reaction affecting life itself on earth.

Haraway framing resonates with other thinkers who see the Anthropocene as a crisis of  exhaustion. Anna Tsing, for example, describes the “inflection point” as the loss of refugia. The very pockets of life that would be able to sustain recovery prevented a mass extinction. In similar lenses, Jason Moore argues “cheap nature is at an end; cheapening nature cannot work much longer to sustain extraction and production in and of the contemporary world because most of the reserves of the earth have been drained, burned, depleted, poisoned, exterminated, and otherwise exhausted” (Haraway, Lines 32-35). Both perspectives highlight how these systems that are able to be these safe havens for us and other species are being depleted and destroyed. The true extent of the detrimental effects Anthropocene has affected our ecological environment is seen with the scarcity of places and resources to recover from any sort of the damage either us or any species may face.

However, Haraway doesn’t stop at just proclamations alone, She proposes the Cthulucene as an alternative way of naming the foreseen future. Unlike the Anthropocene, which emphasizes the human dominance and destruction around us, the Chhthulucene is about webs of connection and survival across species. It asks us to focus less on human centered progress and more on cultivating shared forms of life and care. Haraway slogan “Make Kin Not Babies!”(Haraway, Line 91) encaptures this vision. It isn’t really just about limiting human reproduction but to also shift our attention to actually caring for the life around us, not just people but the other species that also inhabit this planet.

In conclusion, Haraway’s work offers more than just a big warning about the systemic crisis currently progressing in our time frame. It also broadens the scope of the Anthropocene, allowing us to imagine and come up with new ways of living together not only with other humans but other species as well in this progressively damaging world. If Anthropocene marks the destruction of refuges, then the Cthulucene leads us towards a careful and creative work of building back those destroyed refuges and restoring the relationship between us and other species and taking more accountability of our actions.

Throughout chapters 1-8, but more so specifically 1-5, the scenes where Snowman, or Jimmy, reflects on the experiences of his younger self in the pre-apocalyptic society, he appears to place a huge emphasis on his relationship with Crake, or Glenn. I would like to bring up the interpretation that there appears to be some sort of homoerotic undertone between the two. In addition to this idea, I feel that Jimmy is also subconsciously denying it, and Crake might be indifferent to it (possibly suggesting a one-sided homoeroticism). In his flashbacks, the two share an emotional bond, even though Crake presents himself as distant and “cold.” To be clear, I do not think that there is an explicit homosexual relationship between them, but rather that there are brief, but intertwined, underlying tones of homoeroticity. As Atwood states, “He had his doubts about Crake’s honourableness, intellectual[ness]…He knew a bit more about Crake than his mother did” (70). From a broad surface-level view, it appears that Jimmy envies Crake because of the fact that his mother perceives Crake to be such an intellectual and well-spoken boy, contrary to what Jimmy knows about Crake’s interests. However, looking deeply, I sense that Jimmy finds pride in knowing Crake on a deeper level than his mother does. Almost as if in competition with his mother, whom he has a complex relationship with, he finds a strong interest in his relationship with Crake. Even as he is first introduced to Crake, Atwood states, “Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back…Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake” (73). It appears to me that Jimmy is intrigued by Crake and his being. Aside from Crake’s distancing demeanor, Jimmy desires to be of value in Crake’s life. Almost as if Jimmy senses that Crake is reserving his true personality, he wants to be the one to crack that mask and see what Crake is truly like. To continue, in this particular scene, I felt that there was a subconscious denial of homosexual undertones. Atwood states, “Jimmy and Crake took to hanging out together…not every day, they weren’t gay or anything, but at least twice a week…” (76). I found it interesting that Jimmy had to directly claim that he and Crake were not romantically involved. If their relationship were strictly set to the bounds of a heterosexual friendship, which is what would be considered the “norm,” then why would he feel the need to explicitly say that there are no such relations to the reader? I would like to suggest that Jimmy might consider his relationship with Crake to be deeper than a regular friendship, not exactly in a set-in-stone homosexual relationship way, but in an emotional and personal way. To add to that, Atwood states, “These sessions would take place for the most part in silence…It would be Crake who’d decide what to watch and when to stop watching it…” (86). The two would have these exclusive “hangouts” with one another, partaking in the binging of extremely graphic media. To watch such media would normally be done in private, given the extreme nature of it and the taboos of sexual and gory content. However, they both mutually consent to watching and commenting on such graphic content, while not giving up any sort of vulnerability. They find safety, comfort, and a mutual understanding in each other’s company, allowing them to create a safe space to view such sensitive content. Lastly, Jimmy also seems to believe that he has a better understanding of Crake’s vulnerable side, more so than Crake himself. In his thoughts on Crake, he acknowledges Crake’s aloofness, but also seems to realize that there is still the other side of the coin. Atwood states, “How could I have missed it…What he was telling me…he’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out” (184). Jimmy seems to be reflecting on Crake’s very nature of being distant, getting disappointed with himself for not being able to fully understand Crake’s feelings in this specific moment. All in all, I think they have a complex relationship with each other, hinting at slight undertones of homosexuality, involving emotional connection.