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Oryx And Crake: An Analysis

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The that the novel world of Oryx and Crake presents is a bleak one, even before the post-apocalyptic nightmare that Snowman and the Crakers find themselves living in. The pre-apocalyptic world was filled with rampant greed, consumerism, and corruption. Had a reader not been presented with the post-apocalyptic present, then it might be hard to wonder how the world could have become worse. Unfortunately, it did become worse, and one man was primarily responsible for it--and that man was Crake. Crake is the monstrous figure of the novel, not just because he wiped out most of humanity, but also because he used the negative societal institutions in place to accomplish this through making others subjects of interpellation and using ISAs and RSAs …show more content…

A reader may make a reasonable case for why the society of Oryx and Crake is the most monstrous entity of the book. After all, this is a world where a concept called “commodification” has been taken to an extreme. As Marxist theory defines it, commodification is when people are valued as a commodity just like objects. They have no value as people, but rather as “numbers, statistics, and cogs in an abstract economic machine” (Parker 225). This can be seen most clearly with Oryx, who has been used as a commodity for her entire life. As she has come to believe, love is the ideal, but money value is the most dependable thing: “It was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much” (Atwood 126). In a world like this, why would a single man be considered the true monster, and not the society? Might it not be possible that he is merely a product of the highly commodified world that he’s living in? While it is relevant to take society into account, putting the blame entirely on the society of Oryx and Crake completely ignores individual …show more content…

The BlyssPluss pill has been described and marketed in a way so that it will appeal to the masses--sex without consequence. Crake counts on the pill selling well according to this logic: “The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events…” (Atwood 296). This is a more refined version of the understanding that Crake gained when he was fourteen. His monstrosity comes from his deep understanding of how people operate under false ideologies, and then using this understanding to destroy rather than create. Society may have helped shape his understanding of the world, but Crake is still individually responsible for the destruction that he wrought, especially because there is ample evidence that he gained relative autonomy. He possessed the capacity to change the world on a large scale, whether for good or ill, and he chose the second

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