Week 13: Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake

This week I read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I had already read The Handmaid's Tale, and I liked Atwood's writing style better as applied to the Oryx and Crake setting--the distant, almost dreamlike feeling of her writing felt like it suited an apocalyptic wasteland, while in The Handmaid's Tale it made me frustrated with the protagonist.

I especially liked the ending of Oryx and Crake--I was wondering for a while where Atwood would go with the novel, and ending on the big question of whether Jimmy/Snowman would let the humans survivors live or die felt like a really appropriate culmination of his mental yanking back-and-forth between his Snowman-self and Jim-self throughout the novel. Personally I think he killed the humans--his role with the Crakers seems to be his first time truly taking meaningful responsibility, and he also disassociates himself more and more from his past self throughout the novel until that final moment when he remembers Crake telling him not to let him down.