Daniel Gonzalez
E 360S
10/9/2015
Running Out of Fishes and Loaves
Have you ever wondered what life on Earth is going to be like in the future, either within or beyond your own lifespan? If you posed this question to a hundred random people, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out people might think about what kind of technology we’ll have in the future or which animal species will be the next to go extinct, but rarely will you find somebody who wonders if there even is a real future for mankind. Of course, if that one person who says that happens to write a best-selling novel about the idea and educate the people of the world, then maybe we’ll have a fighting chance. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake is a dystopian, fiction novel, but it has an alarming sense of realism once you actually figure out Atwood’s overall message. With this novel, Margaret Atwood is telling us that we are killing our planet, our species, and we don’t even know it. She’s saying that we are growing too fast and our resources cannot keep up with our rapid expansion, and this can lead to only one outcome: the end of humankind as we know it.
In this novel, Atwood uses a first-person narrative to tell this story – that of Snowman/Jimmy. Because of this, we get a limited view of what’s happening. If there’s any part of the story we need to read about, we either have to see it through Snowman’s eyes or we have to hear somebody else tell it to him, and this gives us a limited view into this dystopian world which Atwood has created. The use of this narrative becomes increasingly complex as she transitions between present-Snowman narratives and past-Jimmy narratives. Oftentimes, during a Jimmy moment in the novel, the reader’s concentration and focus will be disrupted by random comments inserted by Snowman. Now, it’s important to remember how the novel began, with Snowman, a new species, and no other human beings (as we know them). What Atwood is doing here is telling us to not get caught up in the story of Jimmy. She’s reminding us that there’s an inevitable doom that human beings will meet and these jarring, disruptive Snowman thoughts are there to keep us grounded in reality. It’s like she’s saying, “Don’t forget, things are going to get worse. Much worse.” As you make your way through this novel, it becomes clear that this message isn’t just intended for the book, it’s meant to apply to our own world. Atwood is telling us that things are bad and they’re going to continue to get worse if we stay on the path which we’re currently on.
Another aspect of this novel that really stands out is Atwood’s references to a piece written by Garret Hardin called The Tragedy of the Commons. In this piece, Hardin talks of the dangers of letting man pursue his own interests and to not limit human reproduction or the number of resources a single person can have. When reading this article, you come across this line, “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interests” (Hardin 1244), and this line sounds very similar to one said by Crake in the novel, “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac….But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever” (Atwood 120). In those of these lines, their respective authors are saying that man is the only animal that knows death is inevitable, and it’s this knowledge that makes us dangerous. Because we can see our own impending doom, we have the urge to do as much as possible, get as much as possible, and to look after ourselves and our families. But this pursuit of happiness, this need to possess as many resources as possible, is exactly what’s destroying our race. As Crake says, “You can’t couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely” (Atwood 120), and that’s exactly what we’re doing, it’s only a matter of time before it catches up to us.
The use of normalization in this novel is an approach that Atwood utilizes in order to get the reader thinking on a deeper level, beyond the text and the plot of the story. On several occasions, Atwood takes some extreme ideas and structures her sentences in such a way that she makes them seem almost normal. The reader doesn’t even realize he’s read something so extreme until a page or two later. An example of this normalization of the extreme comes when Crake introduces Jimmy to the BlyssPlus pill, and its main purpose is to act as a “one-time-does-it-all birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level” (Atwood 294). But that wasn’t an advertised function of the pill, which means that it was designed to unknowingly sterilize the human population. Crake goes on to say that this could be reversible, but only by changing the components of the pill – it cannot be reversed in individual subjects. That idea standing on its own is terrible and incredibly extreme, but the way Atwood sets it up, the language she uses and the way she structures her sentences around this idea make it seem like it’s actually a good idea. What she’s doing here, by making extreme ideas in the novel seem so normal, is showing us how we, as humans, are gradually becoming more and more normalized to the extreme. And it’s this desensitization that will allow us to become more accepting to radical ideas, such as gene splicing, genetically modified foods, and the need to create drugs that will unknowingly sterilize the human race.
One technique that Atwood uses to structure her writing and drive home her points is the use of curse words and the way she summarizes important ideas in one sentence. In the beginning of chapter six, we see this line said by Crake, “In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck” (Atwood 120). This one sentence alone is saying so much more than just what we see. The use of the curse word here is used to grab your attention. Cursing isn’t new at this point in the novel, but in the past ten pages, we had only come across one other curse word, which says that Atwood is strategically placing these words for emphasis. In this particular passage, Atwood uses the curse word to signal to the reader that what she’s saying here is important, and then she uses the one sentence summary to deliver her message, which is that “[man is] one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources” (Atwood 120), but instead, the less resources we have available to us, the more we reproduce, whether it be because we sense our impending doom and feel the need to ensure the survival of our family names or simply because we’re bored.
Another of the many literary tools that Atwood utilizes is the use of ambiguity to not only keep the reader’s attention, but to also raise more questions than answers. There are a lot of questions in this novel that take a long time to get answered, such as what happened to the human race and how this dystopian world came to be. But there are also numerous questions in this novel that are never answered, such as: why did Jimmy’s mom leave without him? Why did Crake bother creating another species instead of just ending the human race and being done with it? Did Oryx know what Crake was up to the whole time? Why did Crake choose Jimmy as the leader of these Crakers, rather than himself? Atwood wants to raise these questions, and more, because she wants her readers to question other things in their own lives: how big can our population get before food shortage becomes a real issue? How far is too far when it comes to technological advancements? Will there be another near-mass extinction in order to wipe the slate clean and start over? How many people will this planet hold in 50 years? 100 years? Atwood wants us to step out of the comfort of our own lives and face the harsh reality of these concerns. We can’t keep going about our own way, pursuing our own best interests. Instead, we need to focus on what’s best for humankind and this planet we inhabit. Things are bad now, but there might still be time to turn this ship around and find a solution to these problems we face. But if we keep putting it off, it will get to point of no return, and who knows what extreme measures we’ll turn to in order to preserve our species.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake takes the reader on a journey through a dystopian world through the eyes of a man who saw the world go from bad, to worse, to nonexistent. But this work of fiction is more than just entertainment, it’s a warning. We cannot keep ignoring the facts surrounding these issues because they make us uncomfortable or they don’t suit our interests. It was only a few decades ago that people worldwide believed that cigarettes did not have an impact on health or the environment. Nowadays, it’s common knowledge that there are major health risks involved with smoking and anyone who says otherwise is looked upon as uninformed or unintelligent. But we don’t have that kind of time with these issues – we can’t simply wait a few decades in order for people to actually start believing the science and facts surrounding global warming, overpopulation, and shortage of resources. If we wait that long, it might be too late to make the corrections and adjustments we need to make in order to sustain our way of life. Margaret Atwood sees these issues clear as day, and she wrote this novel to make them clear to us. Despite the fact that we can see our own inevitable doom, we still like to believe we are invincible and that someone somewhere will find a way to fix our major issues. But we’re not invincible, we can’t live forever, and we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing because, truth be told, we don’t have a prophet here who can magically turn a few fish and loaves of bread into an infinite resource. And that means we need to practice restraint in all aspects of our life, otherwise, before we know it, we’ll be taking our medically prescribed BlyssPlus pills and washing them down with a handful of Chickienobs.

Bibliography 1. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor, 2003. Print. 2. Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons." (n.d.): n. pag. Rpt. in Science. Vol. 162. N.p.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, n.d. 1243-248. Print. Ser. 3859