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Criticism In Oryx And Crake

1160 Words5 Pages
Set in the United States of the 21st century, in a post-apocalyptic world under a burning sun, Oryx and Crake describes in flashbacks a recognisably almost contemporaneous materialist and hedonistic dystopian society segregated into privileged, gated corporate compounds and recalcitrant, impoverished ‘pleeblands,’ and both controlled by the corporation-run police force ‘CorpSeCorps’ – of commodification, extreme consumerism and ‘health drug’ and anti-aging addiction (provided for by telltale corporations like HelthWyzer or AnooYoo) in a profit-driven neoliberal economy. In Oryx and Crake we first meet Snowman/Jimmy, the narrator, in the typically Canadian pose of the survivor, ‘getting bushed’ but sticking it out on a tree as dangerous predators, such as ‘wolvogs’ (wolf/dog hybrids), roam the area. His pose recalls, in reversal, the Darwinian theme here interchangeably used as “apelike man or manlike ape” (Oryx and Crake 8). Jimmy fears to be the ‘last man’ – “I’m your ancestor” (123) Jimmy says – soon to be extinct in this post-apocalyptic world otherwise inhabited by the bioengineered, well-adapted, posthuman ‘Crakers’, named after their god-creator Crake. He designed the Crakers as the perfect posthumans to end the human historic cycle of destruction. For Crake, it is human nature, not only culture, which creates these problems. The Crakers are not monstrous or hideous but of “suprahuman beauty” (Rozelle 2010: 68), constantly singing with beautiful voices, pointing
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