When reading chapters 5 to 8, we get to see more of the world that Jimmy lives in, present and future. Before I started to read the book, I read the book description to see what type of world I was going into. One thing caught my eye, “Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may might be the last human…” The last human? Maybe there will be at least another human in the story, right? During the time in the book when we get to see how Crake’s school was better than Jimmy’s in chapter 8. I was amazed by how different Crake’s school, Watson–Crick Institute, is. How their labs are making brainless chickens, different types of marijuana, and wolovgs (Which are adorable killer dogs that give you puppy eyes). Jimmy was amazed by everything. I start to realize they mention Jimmy’s mother from time to time and get to know more of Crake’s past. During the visit, Crake does hypothetical scenarios, like what they used to do before in high school. He said to Jimmy that once healing the sick, then what? Jimmy couldn’t think of any answer as then Crake said, “So, you’d need more sick people. Or else – and it might be the same thing – more diseases. New and different ones. Rights?” (Atwood pg211) The more he explains, the more I’m stunned by reading the story. Crake then said This isn’t a hypothetical scenario, it’s happening and HealthWyzer “Been doing for years.” (Atwood pg211) making new diseases. That’s not the only shocking part, but that Crake’s father knew all along. Had copies in his drive, and Crake read them all after he died. They said he jumped off a bridge, but Crake said that they pushed him. Crake said how his mother and Uncle knew too. Then Crake said maybe that is why Jimmy’s mom left. I believed maybe that’s why she did, after all, she believed what Jimmy’s father had been working on in the lab was wrong. Maybe that’s the reason why she broke the computer. Jimmy denies it, but I agree. 

Then it hits me. Every time we read about Jimmy, or what he calls himself Snowman, we only see him as human. Everyone else isn’t human. I was hoping we would get to see what Crake is doing in this new world, but now, finishing up to chapter 8, I don’t think we will anymore. The back of the book said that Jimmy may be the last human. My theory is that healthWyzer will make a disease that will wipe out most of humanity unless they buy a very expensive pill or a different way to have the cure. Most, and I mean MANY, couldn’t afford it, and maybe Crake helped out Jimmy. Maybe through the progress he also doesn’t make by helping Jimmy. Just by that, we see Jimmy being the only human around perfect children. Snowman, aka Jimmy, is going to see Crake, but we aren’t up to that part yet. A little hope in me wants him to be alive, and yet I also like being right. If he is alive, then maybe we will know how they are both still alive, and if not, then we will see how humanity fell apart.

When reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, I notice that from Snowman’s point of view, we are seeing through a lifeless future, a person who is struggling with no money, no home, and no memory. Atwood doesn’t reveal everything at once; she just gives down the world in parts of Snowman’s now and flashes back to his past. It’s an interesting, but also kind of putting, passage. Instead of the future being simply peaceful with no harm, Atwood leads us to consider that maybe Earth is on the verge of becoming a wasteland, since humans are no longer the dominant species. Here, there’s not even enough time (Atwood 1), but all that is human-made has become irrelevant.

Survival, however, is difficult. Snowman spends most of his time looking for food and not getting killed. He was so lonely that he talked to himself to have company. These struggles show how messy life can be, even with the technology and conveniences we still pursue. Almost as if Atwood is warning us all about what happens when science is unrestricted and corporate greed runs rampant. The main creation was the pigoon, which is a type of pig that could replace organs with humans  (Attwood 23-24). And while this is the kind of technology that could be a matter of life and death, what’s really at stake here isn’t lives so much as profits. During the fight between Jimmy’s parents, we can tell that these companies don’t plan to help people but rather want to make more money (Atwood 56-57). Atwood has created this world to show a world that has big companies and money hungry people making decisions that lead society to be torn apart. Another theme is memory.  They’re sometimes real, and then again, they seem murky.  For Snowman, his memories are the only connection to the others, but he is not sure about himself, not knowing who he is.

At the end, Oryx and Crake is not a story about how the future turned into a wasteland. It is a story about the dangers and consequences of human wants and needs, and how easily life can be lost in that way, which could lead you to start from the beginning. Atwood really puts these issues front and center, showing issues of global problems that turn the story into a reality that mirrors ours and could give us a warning about our world, and to give us a choice in our decision-making, whether what we make is the right choice or not.

In the first five chapters of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood builds up the world of a distant future, one where technological advancements far beyond what we have today exist and seemingly dominate the world. A world that eventually turns into ruins with seemingly almost no humans left and the cause of this collapse in society is still left unknown to the reader. However, even if there are hardly any humans left in this future animals still roam the earth and are seemingly thriving. These creatures are all human made hybrid of animals we all know, the rakunks being a mix of racoons and skunks, wolvogs a mix of wolves and dogs, and the most interesting of the bunch being pigoons which are a mix of pig and human DNA. All these creatures, most apparent in the pigoons, represent the blurred lines between nature and commerce, the consequences of genetic engineering by humans, and human arrogance. They are each prime examples about the dangers in the commercialization of biotechnology.

In these opening chapters one of the talked about significant animals is the pigoon, pigs with human DNA that were engineered to grow organs for human transplantations, “The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection” (Atwood, p.15) In Snowman’s childhood they were seen as the next cutting-edge product, a consumer object that was made to “better the lives of everyone”. Yet even if the pigoons were a useful product, the nature of their creation is unsettling. They crossed many ethical boundaries: a pig that is infused with human DNA, maybe even their own, sold as a product. Later in Snowman’s future these very same pigoons are still alive, but they’ve changed. The pigoons Snowman now encounters have grown dangerous, now bearing tusks like nature intended for them, “One was a male; he thought he could see the gleaming point of a white tusk. Pigoons were supposed to be tusk-free, but maybe they were reverting to type now they’d gone feral, a fast-forward process considering their rapid-maturity genes.” (Atwood, p. 20). Symbolically, they can represent the failure of humans attempts to control life through science. Even when they were modified to have no tusks so they could easier be used as a commercial product for organ transplants, they were still able to go against what humans tried to weed out of them. Furthermore, even with the presence of these genetically engineered animals that were made to save humanity, society still collapsed. They represent humanity’s reliance on new scientific “solutions” that can lead to unpredictable dangers later.

The pigoons seem to be a critique on corporate science, representing human hubris in believing they have the power to control life through the use of engineering without consequences. They also highlight the greed in humans through the commercialization of biology, even going as far as selling organs as if they weren’t an intimate part of the body. They are central metaphors in this story that show the dangers of reducing life to mere profit. Their mere existence reveals how the pursuit of progress when used in an unethical manner, stripped of humanity, can spiral to a destructive force that will in the end cause more harm than good for humanity.

In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, she uses anecdotes as a central part of her storytelling. She expertly brings up these anecdotes through either words, or phrases that spark up memories, and it seems to be a common concept in the world building of this novel. You are thrown between two worlds: the current future which has Snowman loathing around what remains of the world he had come to known; and a past future which looks different than our world but is the past for Jimmy (Snowman). Atwood does an effortless job of blending these worlds together in the context of storytelling. She is building two separate worlds both of them equally futuristic to us, but one is the cause, and the other is the effect. Atwood’s world is different than a dystopia in my opinion, as it feels like the world is moving on peacefully without human interaction. In the first page of the novel it states, “on the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow…the offshore towers stand out in the dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue lagoon…the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble…” (Atwood 1). The oddity to have such an honestly beautiful description for what is supposed to be a destructed world is intriguing to me. Maybe this isn’t supposed to be a destroyed world. I am still reading the novel, and haven’t gotten to chapter 8 yet, so maybe my hypothesis well be wrong. However, as it stands now I have a feeling this futuristic world (the one Snowman is in) is supposed to be the better world; the utopia, and the story is here to show the slow downfall of the past world into this new world that will rebuild itself now that humans are no longer the focal point of it.

First, let me explain why I think this new world is supposed to be a utopia of sense. In the beginning of the story before we start going deep into the anecdotes of Snowman’s past, we get to see the world as it is, and one important factor we learn early on is in relation to time. In the novel it states, “there’s an absence of time,” (Atwood 1). This is laid straight out for us the reader on the first page, and I think that is important. It is telling us that a concept created by humans, time, is no longer known; it doesn’t exist. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that this is a world where human creations are no longer needed. Later on we see a group of kids, who find a bunch of items that humans might have seen in their everyday life. They find a piano key, a hubcap, a bottlecap, a plastic container, and so on. They ask Snowman what are these items, and all he can say is that they’re things from the past. (Atwood 7). What this conveys is that nothing from the past is of any use for the people in this world. Yes, some of these items are of varying importance; but something like a plastic container could be used to store water, or food, but is still seen as something from a past time, as if it doesn’t matter what it is anymore. The kids themselves are interesting; they are described as, “…each one being perfect…” (Atwood 8). These kids are described almost elegantly; they have their issues but they are seen as almost a beautiful animal, not human. They are described as a part of nature and they interact with it as so. So, if these are the new generation, what does that mean for the world? Well, that’s what I’m going to get at. I believe these kids are suppose to be the new humans, they are suppose to start anew and restore life on Earth by being a vicarious part of it, instead of being an entity which only destroys.

Let’s talk about the world before. The world before is a futuristic world that seems to be build off capitalistic corporations which are doing anything to further their earnings. One of these corporations was OrganInc Farms which was an organization that mutated different animals to try to form humanoid organs to sell them. They’re top animal was a pigoon, which was a pigeon/pig combination that has skin, and other organs that could be used as replacements for humans. (Atwood 23-24). This is of course a massive innovation, and it could save many lives, how could this possible mess up the world? It is revealed later on during an argument between Jimmy’s mother and father that these companies aren’t all sunshine and rainbows, and it is obvious that these companies only care about draining the money from their patients then use their findings for the betterment of the world, (Atwood 56-57). Both of these components come together to illuminate the picture of a past world that was riddled with greed. It was a world that cared more about the exchange of money then the actually protection of it’s people, and I think it is suppose to shed light on our actual world. See, our world is not far off from this world in ideology. There are capitalistic companies in this world that will rather not use their funds to help the world, and will rather waste it on making their company better so they can get more money. It’s a constant cycle of that, and I feel Atwood is trying to point out what our world will succumb to if we continually ignore it’s pleas for help (while obviously having science fiction elements that dramatize the reality). She is trying to say if we don’t stop our era of capitalism and go into an era of reconstruction, we will wind up in a world where nature takes over, and we will have to resort back to the animals we use to be.

I think that one of the most important parts of Oryx and Crake is the loss of art. In Chapter 8, it’s revealed that humanities and art have lost their appeal, as they fail to compete with health companies in the grand scheme of making money. All that mattered was science and the ability to make money from it, which is why Watson-Crick received much more funding than Martha Graham. While it does make sense to prioritize life-saving technology over the creative parts of human expression, it’s revealed to us that the technology already exists. These companies have the potential to cure diseases from all of humanity. Instead, it’s revealed that HelthWyzer manufactures new diseases, only to sell the solutions to make a profit. Humanity has the potential to finally recover from the damage done to the planet, but all of it is intentionally ignored because of the profit incentives. As a result, any passion for art is quickly burned out because it is mostly considered useless to society. Its only use would be to promote products through advertising. I believe that art is what defines humanity, and that losing art no longer makes us human. Without it, we are only here to survive and trade. We become just another species on the planet, but are actively destroying it instead of passing through the cycle of life naturally.

Then come the Crakers. As shown in Chapter 7, the Crakers have multiple different biological traits taken from other species in order to be self-sustaining. They can purr to heal wounds, repel predators with their urine, and have unique reproduction habits to maintain the population. It’s like if humans were genetically modified to have the advantages of other species. However, the Crakers are not human, in my opinion, because they lack art. They are communal and don’t face any of the same problems that humanity once did, but they don’t create anything either. They simply survive and care for each other. The Crakers are a product of selective experimentation to replace humanity without the flaws of living in society. In theory, this existence would be “perfect,” as Crake intended for them to be. What Crake didn’t take into account however is Jimmy. Jimmy, or Snowman, is the variable that can disturb the Crakers’s natural habitat. He tells them stories of past civilization and its flaws, and also mildly censors them so that the Crakers can try to make sense of it. If the Crakers were to make art or have any sort of monetary system, then Crake’s experiment will have failed. Eventually, this little glimpse of humanity can lead to all of the problems that Crake specifically tried to avoid. The subjectivity of art would inevitably lead to hierarchy, conflict, and struggle. History would end up repeating itself because of the selfishness that draws a divide between others.

I believe Atwood heavily alludes to art being what makes us human through Jimmy’s characterization and his position in the story. Jimmy expresses himself as feeling like an outcast to the Crakers because although they are reminiscent of a human being, they lack any of the qualities that he had from his previous life in society. Now that civilization is gone, all of the profit schemes mentioned earlier are useless. The elimination of money is precisely what Crake did to avoid possible conflict between the Crakers. The idea of humanity being replaced is uncomfortable to us, because our ideas and morals are shaped by a mutual understanding for wanting each other to thrive. Atwood challenges this by having these new “perfect” creatures replace us, without any of the flaws that stem from our society. They are “perfect” only because they lack what makes them human.