Oryx And Crake By Margaret Atwood Critical Analysis

Margaret Atwood’s contemporary novel, Oryx and Crake, is not only a chillingly dystopian tale, but a warning about our future. Atwood immerses the reader into a post-apocalyptic setting, which Snowman, the lone survivor of humanity, must navigate to understand what has taken place. To create a believable futuristic world, Atwood strays from the typical science fiction notions of advanced technology and space travel, and focuses on the elements of our current society that concern her for our future. Atwood’s rendition of the future clearly voices her viable concerns regarding the increasing power of corporations, unrealistic beauty standards, and the undervaluing of the humanities.

In Oryx and Crake, corporations have overthrown the government

Again, Atwood uses simple, matter-of-fact diction to describe the lack of humanities being taught in school. She seamlessly inserts Jimmy’s confession which indicates that all the vocabulary and literature such as “how [he] first encountered Shakespeare was through Anna K.’s rendition of Macbeth”, which indicates that the compound’s schools teach exclusively science courses (Atwood, 102). Additionally, Atwood juxtaposes Martha Graham, a humanities school, with Watson-Crick, a science school to reveal the extreme differences in funding that the schools receive. To illustrate this, Atwood creates a pleebland setting for Martha Graham, where everything appears to be falling apart. Jimmy describes the Academy as “falling apart and surrounded by the tackiest kind of pleeblands”, which juxtaposed with Watson-Crick which contains “a bronzed statue of the Institute’s mascot, the spoat/gider… inside grounds which [are] beautifully laid out… the pathways [are] smooth and wide, which students and faculty [beetle] along in their electric golf carts”, which illustrates that society is willing to spend more time and money on a science school rather than an arts academy (Atwood, 225,234).Similarly, throughout the novel, Atwood highlights that society is viewing the humanities as an accompaniment to the sciences, instead of a faculty of their own. Throughout

Although Atwood does not directly share her own opinions throughout the novel, her powerful writing allows the reader to understand the deep implications of these concerns for themselves. As a result of this, the novel delivers a clear message that our current actions can have a detrimental effect on our