Oryx and Crake is the only Atwood novel with a male narrator. The Year of the Flood,however, sees the author in a more conventional mode: though Jimmy still has a main role, he is joined by characters Ren Brenda , a young dancer locked up in strip club, and Toby, a wry, wary older woman.
Jimmy shoots him. He kills Oryx, knowing Jimmy will kill him once he does. Jimmy renamed himself Snowman because he felt the need to adopt a new persona for the new world in which he lived. It links his to his friends, since both of them were known by adopted names. Crake envisioned the Crakers, created in Paradice to be ideal, immortal predecessors to humans after the dispersal of his killer BlyssPluss Pill. The results revealed that the Crakers became as human as they could be without being born human through teaching and acquiring traits that are known to be human.
Snowman hears the voices of the Crakers coming toward him. They are bringing him his weekly fish. Crake further explained that his unit was working on two main initiatives, the first of which was a pill called BlyssPluss. The pill had four functions. First, it protected against all sexually transmitted diseases.
Second, it provided an unlimited libido. Jimmy recognized Oryx from a child pornography video that he and Crake had seen when they were teenagers. Crake had met Oryx in person when he was in college and employed her for sex work.
In the first hours of the outbreak, Crake returned to Paradice with Oryx in tow, and he slit her throat in front of Jimmy. When Jimmy asked Crake where he found her, Crake replied that he had met her when he was a student at Watson-Crick.
She was a prostitute. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go. Atwood surely had an ending in mind. What and who is Snowman remembering when thinks to himself? In class it was suggested that Jimmy was remembering a note from an old girlfriend and something his mother told him as she died.
How do we make sense of this? Snowman is worried about the Children of Crake and his future. I believe that he is thinking about what the women in his life would have wanted.
He whispers into the air for their advice, as if they were actually looking over him from above. Oh Jimmy you were so funny.
Jimmy thinks about what his girlfriend wrote. He is disturbed that his lover described his being funny in the past tense, as if he were already dead. Without telling Jimmy, Crake had taken it upon himself to contact his past lovers and tell them that he was moving on to better things at RejoovenEsense.
Crake wanted to make sure that Jimmy had no reservations and could commit his entire life to his project The Children of Crake. Was he looking to rebel against what Crake would have wanted and prove that he was still relevant?
Here Snowman is thinking of his mother. I love you Killer. She wanted to liberate the animal like she wanted to liberate humanity. Snowman remembers his mother last words to him right as the novel ends.
Maybe Atwood wants to represent Snowman finally siding with his mother. Who is Snowman trying to liberate? His mother would have probably wanted him to protect humanity. What do you think Snowman decided? When I finished the novel, my immediate thoughts were that Snowman killed the human intruders.
He seems to trust her account too readily. Oryx explains she is useful to Crake because she has contacts at sex clinics and whorehouses because of her history. She assures Jimmy she would never test BlyssPluss on herself, because Crake warned her not to do so. Jimmy misses Oryx deeply when she goes away on these trips, but their reunions are always happy. Oryx is being used to distribute BlyssPluss in much the same way Jimmy is being used to advertise it. But Jimmy, who is better with language and with abstract concepts, who is almost more human than Crake, is still capable of passionate love, and Oryx appreciates that in him.
Jimmy asks Oryx what happened to her in the garage in San Francisco. She asks Jimmy where he dreams up such things. Jimmy persists, asking her if the man who put her there made her have sex. Oryx relents and tells Jimmy about the man, though he suspects she might only be improvising to humor Jimmy. Or is Oryx the one rewriting her own history to make it more tolerable, more humane, and more loving? This disconnect frustrates Jimmy just as it later tortures Snowman—he believes Oryx is trying to artificially erase pain from her life—perhaps in the same way Crake is trying to artificially erase pain from human experience.
Snowman is now coming to the darkest part of his memory. Stay here. Snowman is wishing the past had been different—he is inventing new details and re-writing history.
But Jimmy, in fact, has no gut feeling this happy evening when Oryx is at his house. Jimmy asks her if she loves him, and she laughs. After they sleep together, she gets out of bed and says she is going to get a pizza, and will be right back. Jimmy suggests that they run away together. Oryx does not tell Jimmy whether or not she loves him. In fact, she seems to reject the question altogether. Snowman is thinking that he should have seen the signs.
Crake had asked him once if he would kill someone he loved in order to spare them pain. Snowman curses himself for not taking this seriously. Crake had also suggested that if he died, Oryx would die too. Perhaps to scare her into running away with him.
Just before she leaves to get the pizza, Oryx asks Jimmy, if she and Crake were to ever go away, to take care of the Crakers. Oryx looks emphatic so Jimmy promises. Jimmy waits for Oryx for a long time. He becomes increasingly uneasy and then feels panicked.
Meanwhile, he receives a news alert about the spread of some infection and thinks it will be another minor instance of a contained epidemic or bioterrorism, somewhere far away. But when he goes to the monitor screens, which display maps of infected areas, he sees red splotches all over the globe, spreading fast.
He calls Crake but gets no answer. His phone finally rings, but it is Oryx. She is crying and apologizing—she says that the disease was in the BlyssPluss pills she flew around the globe. She says she only wanted to help people, but then the connection breaks off. Crake was secretly sterilizing people, in a sense, but by killing them!
Up to this point Oryx has never shown or seemed to feel negative emotions—her reaction here is telling. The version of events she naively bought from Crake is not the reality, and now she is complicit in a horrifying plot to wipe out humanity. She believed she was helping people, because Crake told her she was—but now her credulous demeanor has involved her in a terrible crime.
By midnight every major American city has been hit by the disease, which causes people to bleed profusely from every orifice. The three other staff members inside Paradice are growing nervous. Jimmy tells them to stay calm. Suddenly Crake rings the bell to enter the airlock. Jimmy yells at him through the intercom. Crake sounds drunk, which is unusual. Crake has also been selling a version of himself—cool, calm, collected.
His drunken, angry sarcasm reveals he is not what he made himself out to be. What happens next appears to Jimmy as if it is in slow motion. He retrieves a gun from the storage rooms, and tells the other staff members that he has spoken to CorpSeCorps and Crake , who assured him that everything was under control.
He tells the staff they should go back to their houses and rest. They appear relieved, and when they turn their back on Jimmy, he shoots and kills all three. The men had to die in order for him to maintain control. Having already been tricked into promoting a deadly and profoundly violent disease, Jimmy believes he is now forced to commit three additional murders. Already he knows he is fighting for his own survival, and is taking steps to secure his own safety.
Yet those murders in their suddenness and the lack of certainty of the complicity of the now dead staffers, is shocking. Jimmy shifts to survival mode very quickly. Perhaps he is already thinking of his duty to the Crakers, of his promise to Oryx that he would do his best to look after them and keep them alive, or perhaps the pure need to survive really does make one give up on any complex morality. Jimmy drinks and watches news of the spreading plague as he waits for word from Oryx , but it never comes.
Jimmy hears beeping at the door. Crake is trying to punch in the code to enter. Jimmy tells Crake he might be infected, and Crake tells him they are both immune. The immunization had been snuck into the vaccinations Crake and Jimmy used to go to the pleeblands.
Crake has created an antidote to the virus, but has only given it to Jimmy, himself, and perhaps Oryx—he is in utter control over everything in their bodies. He has manipulated their very cells without their knowledge. His power over them is grotesque and undeniable, and he has been exercising it for quite some time. Jimmy is once again being used as a prop in a larger plan. Jimmy is startled by this information, but agrees to let Crake in. When Crake enters, Jimmy sees that Crake has Oryx draped over his arm and that Crake is carrying a jackknife.
Oryx seems to be asleep or unconscious.
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