Working/Current thesis: In Oryx and Crake, how does the contrast between Jimmy’s humanistic values and Crake’s techno-scientific utopianism reveal the dangers of treating the Anthropocene as a problem that can be solved solely through scientific engineering?

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Virago, 2020. 

This novel is the core text for my thesis. It presents the ideological conflict between Jimmy — who preserves humanistic, emotional, ecological values — and Crake — who embraces genetic engineering, scientific mastery, and techno-utopianism. Because the novel itself dramatizes this conflict and its catastrophic consequences, it provides the narrative evidence I need to argue that Atwood uses their contrast to warn readers about the dangers of seeing the Anthropocene as solvable through scientific engineering.

Ciobanu, Calina. “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy.” The Minnesota Review, vol. 2014, no. 83, 1 Nov. 2014, pp. 153–162, doi:10.1215/00265667-2782351. 

Ciobanu argues that at the end of the trilogy (which begins with Oryx and Crake) Atwood doesn’t just show environmental collapse — she redefines what it means to be human under Anthropocene conditions. This perspective helps me show that Atwood goes beyond mere dystopia: she proposes a transformation of humanity’s identity and values in response to ecological catastrophe. Using this article supports the idea that the “solution” the novel offers is not scientific engineering, but a rethinking of humanity.

Dahal, Alisa. “The Posthuman Homo Faber in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: An Ironic Portrayal.” Pursuits: A Journal of English Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 8 June 2023, pp. 1–8, doi:10.3126/pursuits.v7i1.55369. 

Dahal describes Crake as a “posthuman Homo faber” — a human-as-maker who tries to reshape life and solve existential/ecological problems through engineering. The article emphasizes the irony: Crake’s supposedly “scientific salvation” leads not to progress, but to devastation and dehumanization. I will use this source to show how Atwood critiques scientific hubris: invoking the novel’s internal logic, it helps me argue that Crake’s ideology is exposed as dangerous, not heroic.

Gonçalves, Davi Silva, and Luciana Wrege Rassier. “Posthuman Affect in Margaret Atwood’s Science Fiction Oryx & Crake.” Letras, no. 57, 28 Nov. 2018, p. 173, doi:10.5902/2176148529424.

This article focuses on affect — on emotions, empathy, care, human relationships — and shows how posthuman transformation in Atwood’s world threatens these humanistic bonds. This is important for my thewsis because I need to show what is lost when the Anthropocene is treated only as a technical problem: not only the environment, but human emotional and ethical capacities. This article helps me argue that Atwood’s warning is not just ecological, but also moral and existential.

Kabak, Murat. “Margaret Atwood’s ‘Oryx and Crake’ as a Critique of Technological Utopianism.” English Studies at NBU, vol. 7, no. 1, 1 June 2021, pp. 37–50, doi:10.33919/esnbu.21.1.3. 

Kabak contends that the novel challenges the idea of technological utopia — the belief that genetic engineering or biotech can solve human or environmental problems once and for all. According to Kabak, Atwood reveals how such utopian ambitions backfire, resulting in ecological collapse and human extinction. This article will help me build the central argument of my thesis: that the novel warns against the seductive temptation to “fix” the Anthropocene through science and engineering alone.

Sharma, Kamal. “Post-Human Bodies in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Pursuits: A Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 7 May 2024, pp. 74–85, doi:10.3126/pursuits.v8i1.65339. 

Sharma analyzes how, in Atwood’s dystopian world, bodies become objects of scientific control, commodification, and bio-engineering. The “post-human” bodies (such as the Crakers) challenge fundamental assumptions about identity, life, and humanity. This is useful for my thesis because it shows concrete, corporeal consequences of treating life and ecology as engineering problems — not just in abstract ideas, but in the very bodies of beings. It helps me argue that Atwood warns about the deep, embodied dangers of techno-scientific solutions to the Anthropocene.

Lizzie is basically running an emotional daycare for her entire life. She technically gets paid to work at the library, but not for the part she actually spends most of her energy on which is running an emotional support hotline for the entire planet. Her official job is helping patrons, shelving books, answering normal questions. Her unofficial job is everything else: calming anxious strangers emailing about climate collapse, listening to Sylvia’s listeners, soothing her brother, watching her son, managing her husband’s absent-mindedness, and taking care of the dog that keeps rolling in pink soap. It’s like she accidentally became the emotional manager of her whole ecosystem, and somehow she’s the only one who didn’t get the memo.

Offill never says Lizzie inherited caregiving, but everything about the way Lizzie moves through the world suggests it. She comforts her brother. She worries about her son’s school life. She listens carefully to Sylvia’s anxious listeners. She absorbs tension the way some people absorb sunlight. She just takes responsibility for everyone, as if the alternative would be leaving the world slightly less cared for. But the cost of all this is that Lizzie rarely names her own fear. She thinks about climate anxiety, she reads about disaster preparedness, she scrolls through news that leaves her uneasy. However she rarely says any of it out loud. She doesn’t have a space where she can unburden herself the way others unburden themselves onto her. The support she provides so naturally isn’t mirrored back at her.

Offill deepens this with one of the novel’s small but sharp images: the deer. Lizzie wonders why people don’t farm them, and the explanation is simple: they panic when confined (pg. 193). She panics inside the invisible walls built around her: mother, helper, fixer, the one-who-will-handle-it. These roles seem gentle, even admirable from the outside, but from Lizzie’s view, they’re tight. There’s not much room to breathe.

And yet, what makes Lizzie so human is that her caretaking is also the thing that keeps her afloat. In a world full of disappearing birds, rising heat, and endless warnings about what’s coming, her tiny gestures become acts of quiet resistance. Washing soap off the dog. Checking on her brother. Trying to teach her son softness in a world that’s getting harder. These things don’t fix anything on a grand scale, but they tether her to the people she loves. They remind her that not everything is falling apart, not all at once, not everywhere. Offill seems to suggest that surviving the Anthropocene is as much emotional work as it is physical. Lizzie’s care isolates her at times; it exhausts her; it boxes her in. But it also gives her life shape and meaning. It is the thing that stretches her thin and the thing that keeps her from collapsing entirely. And maybe that’s the truth the novel leaves us with:
love asks a lot. Sometimes too much. But somehow, it still becomes the reason we keep going.

I think Lizzie doesn’t survive the world by solving it. And in that, Offill gives us a portrait of a woman whose quiet labor becomes its own form of hope. Not a loud or heroic hope, but the kind that exists in small gestures, soft routines, and the stubborn choice to tend to what’s in front of you. Because even in a collapsing world, care is still a way of saying:
I’m here. You’re here.
And that’s enough to keep going.

Reading Weather feels strange in a very familiar way. Nothing dramatic happens, yet there’s this constant mental static, like your mind is stretched thin and everything—big or small—hits at the same volume. Offill isn’t writing about “the end of the world” itself. She’s writing about the confusion of trying to live a normal life when the world has grown too large to hold inside your head. The fragmentation in the novel isn’t a stylistic trick; it feels like a symptom of right now.

What struck me most is how Lizzie and Henry each deal with the problem of scale in completely different ways. Lizzie absorbs everything. She has no filter. A tiny inconvenience or a random comment overheard on the bus can suddenly expand into a huge, spiraling thought about climate collapse. That’s just her default setting—her mind jumps scales without her meaning to.

Henry is the opposite. He keeps the world small on purpose. He avoids anything that can’t be broken down into something simple or predictable; uncertainty, fear, the things you can’t quantify. It’s a kind of denial, really. A way of trimming the world down to a size he can manage.

Their difference feels painfully close to how we live now. Reality is enormous, complex, and slowly unraveling, but our day-to-day rhythm such as folding laundry, commuting, going to class demands smallness. Lizzie feels the clash between those two scales all the time and sinks into anxiety. Henry avoids it completely. Both feel believable. Both feel recognizable.

That’s why Offill’s fragmented structure feels intentional. Nothing in our lives moves in straight lines anymore. A completely normal afternoon can suddenly be interrupted by a thought like, “Is this world even going to hold together?” One moment you’re reading the news, the next you’re checking your grocery list, then a headline about climate disaster flashes across your screen, then you remember you forgot to text someone back. Our mental landscape simply isn’t built for long, continuous narratives anymore.

So my conclusion is that Offill is really sharing that The horror isn’t collapse, and the horror is the scale of the world we’re living in.

What unravels Lizzie is not the moment of disaster it is the constant whiplash between tiny daily tasks and enormous existential fear. Henry stays steady because he refuses to change scales; Lizzie keeps shifting whether she wants to or not. Most of us are somewhere in between. And that’s why this novel doesn’t build toward a big climax or final catastrophe. This century doesn’t work that way. Offill is telling us that the world is already too big to fit into a neat story. It simply shows that truth in the quietest most precise way.

There’s one image from The Hungry Tide that won’t leave me: Piya crouched beneath Fokir’s body, the storm screaming around them. I feel like he dies the way he lives—wordlessly, instinctively, as if the tide itself had chosen him. And I think that’s the most haunting part that he didn’t save her out of logic or love or loyalty. He just did it. It was the simplest, most natural form of goodness—the kind that doesn’t announce itself or ask for recognition.

After that, the silence between Piya and the world feels different. It’s not emptiness but a kind of translation–the moment when knowledge becomes emotion. When she looks at the GPS later, realizing that Fokir’s movements, his rhythm with the river, are now preserved in data, I felt something ache in me. She’s trying to turn grief into continuity, to make his instinct measurable, to hold on to something that was never hers. But maybe that’s what love looks like in this world: not possession but preservation. The idea that caring for someone or something means keeping their rhythm alive, even when they’re gone.

The novel says, “Piya stayed by Moyna’s side, in her room, where many mourners had gathered…Tutul appeared beside her. He placed a couple of bananas on her lap and sat with her, holding her hand, patient and unmoving.” It’s such a quiet moment, but it carries everything the novel has been trying to say about love, loss, and care. There’s no grand speech, no confession just presence. Piya sits next to Moyna, who has lost her husband, and Moyna allows her to stay. That permission itself feels like forgiveness. Then comes the line that breaks me every time: “She remembered how close his lips had been to her ear…that he was saying the names of his wife and his son.” Even in his final breath, Fokir’s instinct is to remember the ones he loves. Piya realizes that she was never the center of his world, and yet she was part of his final act of tenderness. That’s the kind of love that doesn’t fit into any category—it’s not romantic, not familial, not spiritual. It’s just deeply human.

And maybe this connects to how the novel ends. As one critic puts it, “The novel has this kind of meta-discourse between a liberal performance of institution building versus a revolutionary imagination that wants to completely bring down the existing core of energy. The ending affirms the reformists such as the NGO that represents the future, not a heteronormative coupling and a child and an inheritance. The inheritance is this NGO.” That makes so much sense to me. Nilima’s organization, not Fokir’s death or Piya’s sorrow, becomes the thing that endures. The NGO is the moral afterlife of the novel; it is the place where grief, love, and labor merge into something sustainable. It carries both Fokir’s instinct and Nilima’s patience.

By the end, Piya doesn’t try to forget or move past the pain. She chooses to live with it. Losing Fokir isn’t just a tragedy but reshapes how she understands purpose. Nilima’s realism and Fokir’s instinct come together in her, creating a quiet kind of hope. The future the novel imagines isn’t one of grand revolutions or perfect redemption, but of small, steady acts of care. After the storm, what remains isn’t salvation, but endurance. And sometimes, that’s what survival really means.

In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh examines how language and knowledge shape power in human relationships. Set in the unpredictable waters of the Sundarbas, the novel shows how communication can both connect and divide people. Kanai, Piya, and Fokir each navigate the ‘tide country’ with a different kind of knowledge and these difference reveal how fragile the idea of mastery really is.

Kanai embodies how language becomes a form of power in the novel. As an educated translator from Delhi, he carries an unshakable confidence in his intellect, often treating communication as a way to display superiority rather than to connect. When he refers to Sir Daniel Hamilton’s legacy as “rat eaten islands that couldn’t have possibly been a new country because of the lack of technology” his words reveal a deep elitism (pg 53-54). He dismisses the idealistic vision of equality that Hamilton once imagined further exposes how language can distort rather than clarify meaning. While he translate for Piya, his choices often reflect his bias such as condescending toward the locals and over-explaining their behavior as if he were interpreting an exotic culture for an outsider. Kanai’s linguistic confidence thus mirror a colonial mindset: he sees himself as the one who knows while others merely exist to be explained. Yet as e begins to read his uncle Nirmal’s notebook, Kanai confront the failure of words themselves. Nirmal’s poetic reflections about tides, death and revolution show that even language saturated with knowledge cannot fully capture truth. In this way, Ghosh uses Kanai to critique the illusion that mastery of words equals mastery of reality.

While Kanai depends on words to assert his intelligence, Piya represents another kind of knowledge such as scientific and measurable. As a marine biologist, she believes that collecting data and naming species can lead to understanding. Yet, in the Sundarbans, Ghosh exposes the fragility of this mindset. When Piya first encountered the dolphins’ sound, “she wanted to find a word for it, but there was none she could think of” (pg. 109). Her scientific training fails her at that moment because the experience resists language. The sound exists beyond classification’ it belongs to a form of communication that words cannot capture. Piya’s struggle here mirrors the broader theme that the novel’s most educational characters are the least able to express truth.

Also Piya is scammed by Mejda when trying to rent a boat– an incident that exposes how her reliance on reason and professional purpose leaves her powerless without linguistic or cultural fluency. She cannot negotiate or protest because her language has no place in this environment. Yet. when she begins working with Fokir, who “spoke not a word that she could understand,” she experiences a different form of communication such as one built on gestures and mutual attentiveness. Their quiet collaboration, synchronized by river’s motion and the dolphin’s surfacing becomes what Ghosh called a conversation without speech.

Lastly, if Kanai represents the illusion of mastery and Piya embodies the limits of scientific objectivity, Fokir stands for a different kind of intelligence. He cannot read or write, yet his understanding of the river and its creatures suppresses that of both Kanai and Piya. When Piya first joins him on the boat, she notices how he “seemed to know the river’s moods as if they were voices” (pg122). Fokir’s knowledge is not abstract or analytical; it is lived. His silence is not ignorance but fluency in a Pangea that predates the words. In this way, Ghosh reframes communication itself: the most illiterate man becomes the novel’s most perceptive listener.

While Kanai translate human speech, Fokir “translates” nature, reading signs invisible to others. During the dolphin expedition, his ability to locate the animals relies on sensitivity rather than speech. This silence binds him and Piya together in mutual recognition. Unlike Kanai, who fills every gap with explanation, Fokir leaves room for meaning to emerge from observation and care. Like a Nirmal’s unfinished words in his notebooks, Fokir’s understanding of the river suggests that truth is never fully accessible but must be approached with humility.

In Fokir, Ghosh creates a counterpoint too modern, verbal intelligence. His listening becomes a moral and ecological act: to listen is to coexist.