Preview

Oryx and Crake

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
8428 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Oryx and Crake
Hike
Snowman eventually walks his way across the once park that he had been treading through. He enters the pleeblands—full of wrecked cars and debris. The area used to be residential. The shops on the ground floors are completely empty now. Plants grow through the cracks of most buildings. Soon the plants will overtake the buildings.
Snowman ponders the possibility that he is not the only human alive. Maybe others survived in isolation. He imagines the questions that the human descendants will ask- -how did this happen? He thinks that they just might decide that what they see, remnants of society past are not real.
Snowman remembers an argument he once had with Crake. Crake had asked Jimmy to imagine the world if civilization had been destroyed. Crake surmised that it could be accomplished with the destruction of a single generation. Instructions for how to put together complicated technology would be lost, as would the vast majority of the once available surface metal. Humanity would be finished.
Snowman finds it hard to walk through the overgrown vines that cake the floor. He sees vultures circling him in the sky. He wonders if it even matters if he dies.
The sun rises higher in the sky and Snowman begins to feel light-headed. He tries to hum to cheer himself up. Perhaps he is not actually the Abominable Snowman; he could be the kind of snowman that children build on chilly winter days. He stops to drink water and hopes that he will soon find more.
The houses are slowly replaced with warehouses. After that, he approaches the Compound. This is the dangerous part of his trip, as he will have to cross open space. There is nothing to shield him if he finds that he needs cover.
He finally reaches RejoovenEsense. He maneuvers through the barricades, stepping around the body of a dead guard. As he continues on he sees a trail of abandoned objects, evidence of hope lost.
RejoovenEsense
By the time Snowman reaches the outer wall of the RejoovenEsense Compound,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Snowball is very inventive, he strives to make new innovations on the farm. For example, “He talked learnedly about field drains, silage, and basic slag, and had worked out a complicated scheme for all the animals to drop their dung directly in the fields, at a different spot every day, to save the labour of cartage.” Snowball comes up with these schemes by himself and presents them to the animals. He has read books…

    • 1502 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hope crumbles into disappointment and despair for an outsider and his family in The Black Snow, by Paul Lynch. The opening words, “It was the beginning of darkness”, foreshadow the troubled arc of the narrative.…

    • 349 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    So he returns to the same hot, muggy place, and insanity starts to settle around him. The intense fear of friends dying, burning piles of bodies and the unsettling guilt that he is still alive start to take a toll on…

    • 599 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The crunching of his feet as they threw snow up in all directions echoed in the alley as Bowerman tried to calculate how far they’d ran. No matter how bad his luck was, he was now being chased by this faceless man, and had to do something quick. He was so close that Bowerman could almost make out the mud streaked Adidas high tops, concealed by loose black sweatpants.…

    • 905 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Instead of explaining to Max a picture of the day, Liesel decided it would be more meaningful to bring him a tangible symbol of the first day it snowed. The symbol Liesel brought Max was a handful of snow, which led to a snowman, which led to a snowball fight. This was a moment filled with love and joy as Max joined the family and for that short amount of time lived as normal a life as he had for the entirety of the war, and would until the war was finally over. This moment however also represents a time of fraught worry and dread as the cold and wet from the snow caused Max to catch an almost fatal…

    • 1178 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Oryx and Crake

    • 2152 Words
    • 9 Pages

    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.…

    • 2152 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Oryx and Crake

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The human species has defined itself as one driven towards consumption and exploitation of natural resources. Our rapid evolutionary success and our seemingly relentless appetite for advancement, and utilization, have developed many associated problems, one such problem being the issue of reality. For the purpose of this essay, reality will be defined as “The state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them” and consumption shall be defined as “the action of using up a resource” (Oxford University Press). Population growth rates are remaining stagnant globally, and in the United States there’s has been a decline of a mere three hundredth percent, as released by the World Bank in two thousand eleven. (World Bank Statistics Center) Adding to our success, since the industrial revolution life expectancy rates have increased exponentially. (Silvers, Desnoyers, and Stow 802) As a result we are consuming resources at a rate that is not renewable, or feasible for the future. It is plausible that we will have to rely on scientific advancement to sustain our species. The novel, Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, displays the aftermath of these events as an overpopulated earth advances to meet our needs. In this essay I will examine how human consumption could create a world of false reality, as developed in the main theme of the novel, Oryx and Crake.…

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    While Crake was creating a successful life for himself, Jimmy/Snowman, was struggling to find a job that he enjoyed and his life was spiraling downwards.…

    • 446 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Snowball is full of ambition when the rebellion starts to take its course, because he heartily believes that Animalism could develop into something that all the…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Oryx and Crake

    • 1256 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood illustrates a dystopian world where human beings and numerous hybrids organisms coexist. The setting is drawn in the future and Atwood foreshadows that some animals will go extinct and in order to fill up some gap in the food chain, human will have to fill the gap with modified organisms. Moreover, she suggests several interesting ideas about what she thinks might happen in the future. For example, she suggests that apocalypse will occur in the future and how our technology will be more advanced. The author is trying to figure what would happen in the future, but there is one thing in Oryx and Crake that is already seen in current society which will definitely happen in the future as well. And that one thing is corruption of corporations. There are several corporations in the novel and these corruptions begin at the corporations and infiltrate the entire society to cause a never ending cycle that hurts everyone. Therefore, this essay will discuss how corruption of corporations ultimately leads to destruction and instability of social structures at societal and individual levels.…

    • 1256 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Listen… Our tribe barely knows where we are going as well. The white men just told us to go southwest to camps.” he says, looking up into the night sky, “We don’t know what is going to happen after that. Hopefully, we could find home again.”…

    • 661 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    everyman

    • 663 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Everyman says that he is unready to make such a reckoning, and is horrified to realize who Death is. Everyman asks Death whether he will have any company to go on the journey from life into death. Death tells him he could have company, if anyone was brave enough to go along with him.…

    • 663 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Speaking of Courage

    • 672 Words
    • 2 Pages

    He starts the story with, “The war was over and there was no place in particular to go.” With this statement he implies that he is going nowhere. He states many other things inferring the same thing. He says, “He drove slowly. No hurry, nowhere to go”. Another time he says, “Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go.”…

    • 672 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Returning to the cave, he sleeps. When he wakes, cold and hungry, he knows he should leave the sewers, but knowing that the police have a signed confession from him convinces him to stay. To pass the time, he idly pokes a brick wall with a jagged pipe, eventually…

    • 1633 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Winter Wonderland Sleigh bells ring, are you listening, In the lane, snow is glistening A beautiful sight, We're happy tonight.…

    • 1252 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays