Oryx and Crake SparkNotes Literature Guide

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes give you just what you need to succeed in school:

• Complete Plot Summary and Analysis
• Key Facts About the Work
• Analysis of Major Characters
• Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
• Explanation of Important Quotations
• Author’s Historical Context
• Suggested Essay Topics
• 25-Question Review Quiz

Oryx and Crake features explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols including: the danger of scientific advancement; voices; memory; the dominance of corporate power; blood and roses; Alex the parrot. It also includes detailed analysis of these important characters: Snowman; Oryx; Crake.

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 96

Sample

Snowman is the protagonist of Oryx and Crake. The narrative recounts his life in the postapocalyptic present as well as in the pre-apocalyptic past. Snowman is perhaps the sole human survivor of a pandemic, and he is in charge of a tribe of genetically enhanced humans created by his friend-turned-rival, Crake. Although he takes responsibility for protecting the “Crakers,” he also feels distant from them due to their childlike nature and superior genetic adaptations. As such, Snowman suffers a profound sense of loneliness, and when not scrounging for the resources he needs to survive, he spends much of his time immersed in memories of his old life. Snowman’s early life, when he was called Jimmy, was largely shaped by his mother’s abandonment of him, his friendship with the intelligent but unemotional Crake, and a growing fascination with sex. Snowman also felt scarred by his cold relationship with his father, who remained disappointed in Snowman’s poor performance in math and science. Snowman did show an early gift for performance and wordplay, which earned him popularity among his high school peers. Even so, in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology, Snowman’s affinity for language and the arts marked him as an antiquated and economically unviable throwback.

In the present time of the novel, Snowman journeys back to the Paradice facility at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where Crake developed the plague that obliterated the world’s population. Snowman’s main objective is to collect supplies, and throughout the journey he feels haunted by various memories and particularly by his mother’s abandonment. He’s also haunted by voices from his past, especially the voice of Oryx, a young woman he first saw on a child pornography website and later fell in love with. Other voices that float through Snowman’s mind come from literature and other texts he read at university. More than anything, though, what haunts Snowman are memories of his longtime friendship with Crake. Snowman recalls the entire history of their relationship, from the time they met in high school, all the way through the period when they worked together at RejoovenEsense. Although the reader doesn’t know the full extent of what Crake did until the end of the novel, Snowman’s recollections throughout the book give a fragmentary account of how Crake came to create his disastrous plague. Snowman also frets about his own culpability, since he failed to see the signs indicating who Crake would become.

Crake was Snowman’s best friend, a gifted scientist who eventually developed and released the catastrophic plague that ravaged the earth’s human population. Crake’s view of the world was coldly rational and fiercely atheistic. In addition to rejecting the idea of God, Crake also rejected the idea of capital-N “Nature,” a quasi-divine notion that he believed encouraged a false distinction between what is natural and what is unnatural. During his undergraduate education at the elite Watson-Crick Institute, Crake developed an interest in and extraordinary gift for transgenic research. In contrast to Snowman, who struggled to see genetically modified creatures as natural or “real,” Crake insisted that anything that could be imagined or created was real. Crake’s strictly scientific approach to the world also linked to his sociopathic personality, which allowed him to pursue his ambitious genetic research without concern for the moral implications of that research. Snowman believes that Crake played an important role in the deaths of his own mother and stepfather, which provides further evidence that Crake may have been a sociopath.

Yet despite Crake’s apparent sociopathic personality and his insistence on scientific rationalism, he remains all too human, afflicted by sexual desire, love, and maybe even jealousy—all of which he longed to eliminate from his new race of genetically enhanced humans. During his student days at Watson-Crick, Crake arranged sexual encounters through Student Services, and it was through one of these encounters that he met and fell in love with Oryx. His affection for Oryx led him to hire her as a member of the Paradice Project. At Paradice, Oryx started an affair with Snowman, and though Snowman worried that Crake would feel jealous, Oryx insisted that he was “too smart” for petty jealousy. Even so, Crake ended up slitting Oryx’s throat, and Snowman shot Crake in response. Though Snowman cannot be certain about Crake’s reasons for killing Oryx, he theorizes that jealousy may have played some role. If Snowman’s theory is correct, then Crake’s desire to create a new race of humans that doesn’t exhibit any sexual competition has a certain tragic irony to it, since it implies that Crake wanted to quash behaviors to which he himself felt susceptible.

Oryx is the mysterious young woman with whom both Snowman and Crake fall in love. Born in a rural village somewhere in south or southeast Asia, Oryx was sold into slavery at a young age and spent much of her early life working in the sex industry. Despite the numerous traumas of her youth, Oryx retained a positive attitude. Snowman and Crake first saw Oryx in a video on a child pornography site when they were teenagers. Later, when he was at college, Crake hired her for sexual services. They became lovers, and he employed her at RejoovenEsense, where she worked as a teacher for the Children of Crake. She seduced Snowman and became his lover as well. Despite their intimacy, Snowman never felt like he fully understood Oryx or her motivations. When he inquired about her past, she resisted discussing anything in detail. Only when pressed did she tell Snowman what she went through, but Snowman remained suspicious that she was just humoring him. Oryx remained a mystery to the end, and she largely functions in the novel as a symbol of the intellectual and, later, sexual rivalry between Snowman and Crake.

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The pre-apocalyptic world of Oryx and Crake was full of science and technology companies focused on transgenic research. In constantly pushing the boundaries of possibility, these companies eventually drove civilization over the edge. The term “transgenic research” refers to genetic research that involves artificially introducing genetic material from one species into the DNA of another species. Jimmy’s father worked on transgenic research projects. For example, he was the chief architect of the pigoon, a hybrid pig creature that he designed to grow human kidneys as well as human skin cells. The novel also references a range of other hybrid creatures, like rakunks, wolvogs, bobkittens, and luminescent rabbits genetically altered with jellyfish DNA. Like Jimmy’s father, Crake was a gifted researcher in the field of transgenics. He became so skilled, in fact, that early in his career he began developing his own projects and leading his own research facility. Crake’s most impressive feats of engineering included the BlyssPluss pill and his new race of genetically enhanced humans. Like Crake, few researchers were concerned about the implications of their work at the time. However, from Snowman’s perspective in the postapocalyptic present, it is clear that the lust for scientific advancement led directly to the end of civilization through giving power and resources to unscrupulous researchers.

The society that Snowman grew up in was organized around corporations that wielded an unprecedented and dangerous amount of power. In the world represented in Oryx and Crake, corporations had become so powerful that they had reconfigured where and how people lived. In the twentieth century, people generally migrated toward urban centers. But as corporate power continued to rise throughout the twenty-first century, corporations moved out of the cities and established massive compounds that doubled as gated communities. Employees of these corporations lived in posh residential sectors with houses designed in a range of historic architectural styles. Corporate compounds also included movie theaters, malls, and other elements that once characterized middle-class suburban life but now belonged only to those privileged enough to have high-paying corporate jobs. The clearest example of the danger of corporate dominance appears at the end of the novel, when it becomes clear that the catastrophic event that killed most of the world’s population originated at RejoovenEsense, a particularly powerful corporation with an especially luxurious compound. The enormous resources provided by RejoovenEsense enabled Crake to do the research and development necessary to execute his apocalyptic plan.

Oryx and Crake stages a symbolic battle between the sciences and the arts, with Crake representing the “science” side and Snowman representing the “art” side. In the pre-apocalyptic world of the novel, the sciences clearly dominated at the expense of the arts. All of the major corporations focused their vast financial and human resources on developing cutting-edge technologies and new lines of transgenic research. The corporate bias in favor of the sciences drove the economy as well as society at large. For this reason, schools placed a much greater emphasis on student success in their math and s. . .