Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake provokes a multitude of topics for discussion regarding our own society and where we are heading. One central aspect of the book, a necessary thread for its intended effect, is portraying characters with a severe lack of empathy or sensitivity in order to warn the reader about a possibly desensitized future society. For example, Jimmy publishes false words in his AnooYoo work and treats it like a game: “he’d come to see his job as a challenge: how outrageous could he get, in the realm of fatuous neologism, and still achieve praise?” (250). To an extent, this proves Atwood’s point: when reading about Jimmy’s manipulative treatment of women, his obsession with pornography, or his compulsion to lie in his writings for AnooYoo, I feel warned about people like Jimmy. In the back of my mind I am thinking of everything I can do to not become like him or to see who I know that is similar to him. However, when Jimmy and the other characters in the book are so lacking in humanity, like Crake’s distaste for Nature as a concept, I feel so drilled with the negativity of these characters that I just start to hate the characters instead of contemplate their environment. I get so busy hating Jimmy that I feel almost blinded to the commentary presented in the novel. Jimmy is definitely a product of an unfortunate situation, but I feel like it is easy to blame him for all the problems in the book instead of the world he exists in.
One aspect of our second reading of Oryx and Crake that I found really interesting and thought-provoking was the way Oryx differed from the rest of the children that had been sold into sex slavery and child pornography. When Oryx’s story is first told, I was shocked by her lack of anger or distress over the horrible things that had happened to her. When Jimmy becomes upset upon hearing about Jack’s abuse of Oryx, she replies: “‘Why do you think he is so bad?’ […] ‘He never did anything with me that you don’t do” (141). While reading this I was beginning to think that the common traumatic psychological effects of abuse were being ignored for the sake of having some sort of dream girl to be Jimmy’s love interest. However, when Jimmy’s second discovery of Oryx is told, it is revealed that her strangely positive view of her situation was abnormal for children in her same situation. Some of the other girls said they’d “been drugged,” “smuggled in container ships,” or “made to perform obscene contortions” (254). Whether they are true or not, these girls’ stories are more evident of the kind of trauma they suffered than what Oryx accounted. Compared to them, Oryx is strangely content. It is comforting to know that Atwood recognizes the true effects of abuse, and I am interested to see how Oryx develops considering her strange emotional history.
Why does Jimmy love Oryx so much? Could it be because he feels like he can fix and protect her when no one could protect him? Is it because she is beautiful? Is it because she loves him? Could it be any combination of these, or something totally different?
Hey Alex!
I felt the same thing when I first read the book. I didn’t like Jimmy or his attitude and I didn’t sympathize with him as much as I usually do with the protagonist of a story. However, as I find out more about Crake and the rest of the society, my attitude about Snowman changes. He’s much more human than the rest of them. He might be an unrealistic romantic filled with ideas from a world that doesn’t exist anymore, but at least his humanity remains.
I too was perplexed by Oryx’s forgiving of the people who mistreated her. Sadly, the story she recounted isn’t too far from what many children lives still are. I think Oryx maintains a positive outlook because she managed to get out. I think that if she hadn’t been one of the lucky ones who got to a better place, in time she’d also build up resentment for what had occurred.
I think Snowman loves Oryx so much because she is the only girl that doesn’t fall for his usual bullshit. She doesn’t pity him when he tries to play up the sob story of his mom, most likely because she sees it as not that bad in comparison to what she’d experienced in her old life. While Jimmy, for the most part, could get many girls and afford to dispose of them regularly, he doesn’t do so with Oryx. She’s a “real one.”