Jimmy and Snowman: How a character can change (or not)

                From the beginning of Oryx and Crake, we are shown that Jimmy and Snowman are different people. From the very first Jimmy-centric chapter, we can tell: "Once upon a time, Snowman wasn't Snowman. Instead he was Jimmy. He'd been a good boy then." The narrator never calls Snowman Jimmy, or vice versa. Jimmy has undergone some vast change in becoming Snowman, just as the world has undergone its own upheaval. So examine the two. How are they different?

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Are they different?

                Jimmy's a lecher. Even as a kid, Jimmy would watch depraved, nasty pornography with Crake, wallowing in stuff like "HotTots." As he grew older, he graduated to real women, and grew no less creepy. He took advantage of them, putting on an act where he was vulnerable and broken, and they felt like they could save him. When he got bored of them, he'd let them down gently, and move on. He didn't deliberately hurt them, but nonetheless he didn't have healthy relationships. They were grounded in his need for sex, because Jimmy is selfish. Crake calls him an addict at one point; it certainly seems at some points like his entire life revolves around sex. After a while, when he can no longer find single women, he goes after married ones. He likes them well enough, and even if he isn't taking advantage of them directly, he's certainly hurting their spouses. After a while, he dips his toe in prostitution, and he likes that well enough. I'm sure I don't need to go into how that can be very exploitative. Again, he's not hurting them directly—in fact, he's a paying customer—but he's not at all uncomfortable with being party to their sorry state of affairs.

                Jimmy's a liar. He lies to women—he lies to them when he makes them believe that they can change him, and he lies to them when he tells them that they're not the reason he's breaking up with them after he gets bored of them. He lies to Crake about his relationship with Oryx, and again cuckolds an unwitting man. He lies professionally—perhaps there are some honest advertisers, but Jimmy is not one. He flat-out lies to customers to turn a profit. His life is full of deceit.

                Snowman is, in many ways, no different than Jimmy. He's still hooked on sex, and readers are privy to his haunting remembrance of old sexual experiences as he mournfully masturbates. He still lies: his whole relationship with the Crakers is based upon a delicate lattice of fibs and fictions where Oryx and Crake are gods and he is some sort of demigod liaison to them. In fact, he even leverages this prophetic status to get them to bring him fish every so often. He lies to the Crakers just as he always has lied to everyone he could.

                But Snowman has changed. He is haunted by Oryx, moreso  than any distant memory of a prostitute. Oryx was the only person he ever really loved, and her death bothers him—to the point where, until the scene where Oryx is killed, readers are quite possibly under the impression that she survived in some sense; constant reference is made to her approaching him on her wings, speaking to him, etc., etc. Where he has left and forgotten every other woman, he has not been able to let go of Oryx. He never lied to Oryx, and he never took advantage of her. The man who forced her into pornography—pornography which he used to watch and was fine with—personally offended Jimmy, and he nurtured a hatred of him that Oryx never quite understood. Oryx changed the way Jimmy thought about relationships.

                Snowman is also no longer selfish. Yes, he lies to the Crakers, but many of the lies are for their own good. He lies to them to get them out of the dome and to a safer area, and he wants to lie to them to tell them how to defend themselves if someone attacks them (although ultimately he can't find a way to phrase his advice that won't just arouse further questions). He stays with them, helping and guiding them. And one fish per week isn't that much. Snowman even risks his life to save them, pursuing the humans which discovered the Crakers. Snowman is taking himself into danger in order to save the Crakers, both because he cares about the Crakers, and because he's keeping a promise he made to Crake to protect them, combining unselfishness and honesty.

                Despite the way that many of Jimmy's characteristic found their way into Snowman, Snowman is not Jimmy. Character development in media is often overdone; no one changes as much as some characters. Snowman has changed, but not implausibly. You can see Jimmy inside him, but through rose-coloured glasses. The narrator says that Jimmy "had been a good boy," but even from the get-go he's toying with his mother in order to satisfy some disgusting desire to see her break down. Jimmy wasn't a good boy. But Snowman is.