Struggles In Oryx And Crake

Success of the Elite and Struggles of the Poor
Society divides people into classifications of high, middle and lower class. Who is society to say that one group of people is more important than another? Society judges people and perhaps because of simple things like their career, they are classified lower than others. Social classification has and will continue to be a compelling issue within society, now and in the coming future. Margret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is a dystopian novel set in a futuristic world where a disease has killed off humans. Atwood has continually distinguished that being number smart over word smart immediately makes one higher class and thus successful. Atwood is able to expose how the upper class chooses to ignore

Jimmy, although he is word smart, both his mother and father are number smart which landed him a place in the compounds. Oryx on the other hand grew up very poor and was sold at a young age. Where she lived people sold their children to make some money to be able to survive. As Oryx is telling Jimmy about her childhood, he is getting angry because he does not like the way she was treated and he does not believe that she should have been sold. Oryx was trying to ignore Jimmy when he kept asking for her to go on with the story and about when she was sold she finally replied saying “‘You don’t understand,’… ‘Many people did it. It was the custom.’” (Atwood 119). The moment she was sold, any hope of becoming a successful person was diminished. The fact that Oryx was saying that selling children was a normal thing to do in her town infers that no one cared what was happening. No one in the lower class cared because they could not have done anything anyways because of their own standings, most likely they would be in the same situation. On the other side, no one in the upper class was there trying to help any of those families. While poor families ended up being obliged to sell their children to places like porn industries as Oryx was, the elite were the ones watching the product. Furthermore, people like Jimmy and Crake found amusement from watching vulgar videos including child pornography. Unknowingly, Jimmy once saw Oryx

In Oryx and Crake being number smart is seen as more important. All of the number smart people live in the compounds where it is very safe and it is essentially cut off from the pleeblands which tend to be risky and unsafe. Jimmy goes to school in the pleeblands while Crake goes to a school in the compounds. As Jimmy is visiting Crakes school he notices “[t]he security going into Watson-Crick as very thorough, unlike the sloppy charade that [takes] place at Martha Graham…” (197). This shows that society cares more about the students in the compounds rather the pleeblands. Again, this sustains an idea that people do not care for the safety of those in the pleeblands, thus when attending school in an unsafe environment, achieving success is more difficult. Jimmy does get a view of both sides, at home he sees the luxury life people in the compounds live, but as he attends school he sees how people live in the pleeblands. Jimmy is the only one who does not cheat at his school. The teachers do not really care though. This is because, in the lower class they do not care what you do to pass because in reality, word intelligent people are not going to get anywhere very successful. Also, Crake, being number smart, ends up being very successful and eventually creates the crakers. Jimmy though, never actually goes that far. He works for Crake, but because he is word smart, he is not given that same opportunity as Crake to prosper. Based