The Unnecessary Paranoia of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

As represented in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, fear played an important role and is exploited by the characters in the play. The Crucible beings with a group of girls accusing people of witchcraft for their selfish benefit.Fear is an emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to inflict pain , or a threat. Fear is an emotion that is capable of overtaking and controlling one’s state of mind and well being. However , fear can be used as a motivation factor. Fear influenced these people to take extreme measures and act irrationally. Additionally, fear is a master of suffering capable of haunting those who patronize it Moreover, in The Crucible this erratic emotion causes people to fear being labeled

Medical advancements are very important for extending the quality and quantity of life, however a strong moral compass is needed to make sure, in the name of science, ethical and moral science are not crossed. Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley, and the movie Gattaca propose a technologically advanced society that challenges these ethical and moral views. Although Brave New World and Gattaca relate in the aspect of genetic discrimination, they differ in the limits and powers of technology and the effects of human spirit.

In the Crucible, Arthur Miller shows us how fear and suspicion can destroy a community. As the play develops, Miller shows us how fear and suspicion increase and destroy the community. Throughout the play it becomes apparent that the community gets more and more divided as time goes on. In the beginning there were arguments about ownership of land between some of the villagers.

Ignorance can and will lead to paranoia. When one chooses to ignore facts or evidence in in favor of their preexisting views, they will become misinformed, uneducated and ignorant. In the past and also in today’s society, people have been known to fear having their beliefs proven wrong, and choose the path of denial and paranoia instead of enlightening oneself with knowledge. Many refuse to seek and accept the truth in order to continue with their misconceptions and ignorance, as shown in the passages “Why I Wrote The Crucible”, The Crucible and “Don't Major in Intolerance”

Fear, paranoia, and vengeance all persuaded people’s actions in The Crucible, yet these feelings still play a major role in today’s society. That being said, terrorism can be seen as the “Witch Trials” of today. Similarly to how the people of Salem, Massachusetts created a negative bias towards everyone who they believed had conjured spirits, people today have created this stereotype against Muslims because of fear due to terrorist attacks that have taken place. Fear and paranoia can have a major influence on people to make rash decisions and carry out things they normally would not leading to chaos.

Stem cell research has been quite a controversial topic since its origin in the 1960s by Gopal Das and Joseph Altman. Of course, anything that uses a human embryo would be. Stem cell research could open a vast number of new doors for modern science, it could let us test new drugs, one of which could be the unfound cure for AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease. However, this branch of science comes at a high price, the price of a human life that is only five to six days

Different environments that people come from cause people to have varying perspectives of that environment around them. The perspective that people have is a product of the experiences and the impact that those experiences have on a person’s approach to the trials and tribulations of life. Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, is a novel about a post-apocalyptic world in which the scientific approach to the world clashes with a more naturalistic approach. Crake represents an idealistic view of the world shown by the way he strives for perfections. He believed that in their current form, humans were far from perfect because of the undesirable traits they possessed and devoted his life to fix this inherent problem in humanity by creating the Crakers. Oryx displays an optimistic view of the world on the surface but can be taken as pessimism at times because she never attempts to improve her situation at all. In many ways, she embodies many of the aspects that Crake sees as flaws in human being such as emotional attachments she has with people and how she always seems to find a positive way to view the situation she is in. As the story progresses, it is clear that Jimmy is influenced by Oryx and Crake in how he views the world and in what direction he should guide the Crakers. He values the human element that is present in humanity but also sees the importance of scientific advancements. Through the portrayal of the characters, Atwood is showing how the values of each character

Paranoia an uncontrollable emotion that refers to the suspicion or perception that one has against a hostile or aggressive figure or horror. It can often lead to the point of delusion or irrationality in the person. This emotion is catastrophic, it takes over people's minds and bodies, making their “true” self disappear. Once the fear is inside of a person it is hard to overcome. 1984, is a dystopian novel written by George Orwell. He writes about what he imagines the year 1984 will be like, based off of his knowledge about war, fear, and totalitarian governments in the 1940s and 50s. George Orwell, has personal experience of innocent people that were haunted by paranoia, and is one of the key reasons he decided to become an author and write this book. Paranoia is a frequent recurring topic in this novel, that many citizens in the city of Oceania experience, most importantly, the main character, Winston. People in Airstrip one are haunted by Big brother and the Party, because of their cruel ways of order. Big Brother is a real life representation of dictators from World War Ⅱ, but mostly portrays qualities like Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union. The party ruled under Big Brother, making policies, claims, and decisions for Oceania. Paranoia always has been an analytical part of governments, and is so influential in 1984. This feeling exhibits the true meaning of fear and the alterations that come along with the power a certain group or figure holds above a

Socrates once said, “The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.” While knowledge can be justifiably good through the use of learning how to help others, it can also be horribly dangerous. Society nowadays uses knowledge to classify the people who are worthy of greatness and those who are not. It is in these classifications that the state of human relationships is greatly tested because of inequality. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, two of the main themes are academic importance and the state of human relationships. In the culture that Atwood creates, if an individual does not possess the proper intellect that measures up to societies standards, that individual will be ostracized and deemed worthless, and their social life will

In Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake we see the cause and effect of how our childhood and how we are raised has a large correlation to what type of adult we become. Through the character of Jimmy and later his new persona Snowman, the reader is shown the detrimental effects of an abandoned childhood. Not only do Jimmy’s poor choices in his adult life have a clear link to his neglected and unguided childhood they also create an adult that is emotionally damaged and unable to see the right path in his life even when he wants to.

As I first started to read ‘Oryx and Crake’, I was somewhat skeptical of whether or not I would enjoy reading it. The first chapter confused me with unusual words that I have never heard or seen before. Whenever I read something it is usually a book or magazine that I plan on reading or that is based on actual facts on a certain subject such as history or sports related. This book came as a surprise as I started to read it because it was not as hard to understand as I thought it would be and was actually quite enjoyable. The symbols in this book can mean many different things based on what the reader believes since religion plays a big part in it.

Deeply entrenched within society is the idea that we are continually advancing and developing in all sorts of ways, but mainly for the benefit of human vitality. In Oryx and Crake, one of the experiments the scientists and researchers focuses on is their pigoon project, where they can “grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in transgenic knockout pig hosts” (22). The pigs are genetically modified by inserting human cells into them so they can internally reproduce the same organs as humans do, and are also inserted with spliced genes to “fend off attacks by

In the novel Oryx and Crake, each of the main protagonists has a distinct attitude towards their society and everything that has happened. Given that each character has a very different personality and background, it would make sense that they all have different attitudes towards their changing society. Throughout the novel it is evident that society is going in the direction that Crake wants it to, while Oryx is unaware of the changes occurring around her, and everything in Jimmy’s life appears to be going the opposite of how he planned.

In the novel, “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood, Atwood depicts technology as the reason of the downfall of human society. When Jimmy's dad, a bio-scientist, finally developed technology that makes pig skin transplantable to human skin in order to make humans younger, Jimmy's mom disagreed with his achievement. In this scene, Jimmy listened in on his mom arguing with his dad, “Be as it may, there’s research and there’s research. What you’re doing - this pig brain thing. You’re inferring with the building human blocks of life. It’s immoral. It’s...sacrilegious” (Atwood 57). In this excerpt of “Oryx and Crake”, Jimmy’s mother tells Jimmy’s father that he’s destroying human nature with his new achievement. Jimmy’s father was working on a project

Language forms the basis of knowledge upon which people perceive the world around them. In Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake, the function of language as a way of perceiving reality is an underlying concept throughout the story. Snowman who identified as Jimmy before the apocalypse holds onto the memory of the world that had come to pass through language which as of the apocalypse is meaningful only to him. Jimmy is an outlier in a society driven by the scientific method who seeks solace in language and carries on being an outcast under the guise of Snowman in a post apocalyptic environment. Jimmy is fascinated with language because it is a part of his identity as Atwood conveys the concept of language as a construct of the human world and humanity itself whose denigration would result in a dehumanized society.