Oryx and Crake

Jarrod Zinser

English 100

Oryx and Crake

As I first started to read �Oryx and Crake’, I was somewhat skeptical of whether or not I would enjoy reading it. The first chapter confused me with unusual words that I have never heard or seen before. Whenever I read something it is usually a book or magazine that I plan on reading or that is based on actual facts on a certain subject such as history or sports related. This book came as a surprise as I started to read it because it was not as hard to understand as I thought it would be and was actually quite enjoyable. The symbols in this book can mean many different things based on what the reader believes since religion plays a big part in it.

Margaret Atwood provides us with a story of human catastrophe where everything is going good and in an instance it all falls apart. She seems to be fascinated with technology and believes that ideas which seem impossible now will someday become real. She uses environmental topics that relate to our world today in which devastation has occurred and will continue to happen in the near future. Examples such as droughts, volcanoes erupting, and the Earth’s temperature rising are all pointed to actual civilization and not just a made up compound where scientists try to improve and create new and better things.

As I continued to get further into the novel I was beginning to anticipate a disaster that would soon arise. The compounds seemed prone to trouble with a big number of scientists running around inventing new animals such as pigoons and rakunks and new medicines that seemed too good to be true. While living conditions differed from what we live in today the people in the compounds still faced problems that we also face. Drugs, alcohol, and porn are some of the big problems that occur in both worlds. This made me realize that in our society today we concentrate on making what we have bigger and better instead of doing something about problems that people face everyday, such as drugs and the homeless.

Jimmy had been troubled throughout his life especially during his childhood. His parents didn’t love him; his teachers didn’t think much of him, and the girl of his dreams was involved in child porn. At one part of the novel Jimmy asked his mother if he could get a cat and she replied, “No, Jimmy, you cannot have a cat. We’ve been over this before. Cats might carry diseases that would be bad for the pigoons.” Jimmy did not seem to get the love that he should from his parents but seemed to get through it. Atwood never really explained what the importance was to Oryx being in child pornography and wonder why that was even put in the novel. Problems continue for Jimmy even until the end of the story where he fights to survive when he believes that he is the only one left. It seemed that Jimmy wasn’t as good as Crake and couldn’t live up to Crake’s expectations as he went to a mediocre school and Crake went to a prestigious school.

I became more interested towards the end of the novel as all of the clues from the beginning started to come together. It all started when Jimmy got word of an epidemic that started in Brazil but then started to rapidly spread to other areas. It was in the BlyssPluss Pills that Crake had invented that was making people so sick and dying. Jimmy was put in a tough spot when Crake got back to the compound with Oryx and was considering not letting them in considering the fact that they could be infected as well. This started the downfall as Crake slit Oryx’s throat and Jimmy shot him. Without Crake, Rejoov was doomed to stay running and organized.

Jimmy then had a responsibility to do something with the Crakers. He then explains, “I come from the place of Oryx and Crake,” trying to keep his sentences simple in structure. At this point I could almost predict how the story would end and what was going to happen. When I finally reached the end I was anticipating a grand finale of an ending, yet becoming discouraged at how she ended the novel. I felt as if I read the novel for