Oryx and Crake: Foils to Jimmy

In this blog, I am going to refer to both Snowman and Jimmy as Jimmy. When discussing his character, I am discussing traits that are apparent in both Jimmy and Snowman.

Oryx and Crake are both foils to Jimmy and the most obvious thing they bring out of him is his humanity. While they have accepted most aspects of humanity, Jimmy’s struggle with human nature is central to most of his conflicts.

The development of Oryx’s character has revealed character traits in Jimmy that had previously been hidden. The story of her youth is the first major development we get into her character. We learn that her background is opposite to Jimmy’s: she is from a poor farming town that probably didn’t even know “Compounds” existed. She was forced to work from a young age, and her intelligence seems to have been considered of no consequence: whether she was smart or not did not affect her ability to sell flowers or make porn films. Despite this, her view of humanity is very positive and accepting. When Oryx recounts the death of Uncle En, the man who bought Oryx from her mother, she says “I cried when I heard about [his death]”, and she was thankful that “He could have done much worse things to me, and he didn’t do them” (136). This clashes with Jimmy’s reaction to Uncle En’s business: “Jimmy was outraged by this the first time he heard about it” “He’d whammed the furniture” (Atwood 119). Oryx is able to understand Uncle En, and focuses on his acts of generosity (if it can be called that). Jimmy, however, reacts with outrage at learning a new example of the darkness in humanity.

Jimmy’s reaction is the more relatable. I would be angry if I learnt one of my friends had grown up without parents because someone bought them as a child. Jimmy displays emotion, as he can’t wrap his head around some of the things people have done. However, he is also not above these things: he watched enough child pornography to randomly stumble along a video with Oryx in it (90). He also watched public executions, and reality television about people who had chosen to be euthanized (83). This builds Jimmy as a very human character; he is very much a part of human emotion, conflict, and hypocrisy.

All of this is clear thanks to Oryx and Crake. They both, unlike Jimmy, seem above humanity. They have both understood it and moved past it. Oryx shows this through her her forgivingness and acceptance. She has seen the worst of people, accepted what the conflicts and dark motives that exist in them, and sees the bright side of humanity despite its countless flaws. Crake seems above humanity because of the objectiveness he can keep when considering it. He did create a superhuman race after all. What Jimmy tells us of this creation shows how Crake looks at the human race. He does away with things that bring humans happiness to replace them with more logical systems. Jimmy does not like some of these ideas, because they are very inhuman, and he takes Crake up on his plan to do away with love. While Jimmy gets frustrated, Crake maintains an objective view that defends his plan: “There’s a courtship behaviour in my plan […] except that it would always succeed” (166). This infuriates Jimmy so much that he comments “These arguments had to be played through as a game: if he lost his temper, Crake won” (168). Jimmy represents a natural human response to such a situation: we do not want to see things that make us happy disappear. However Crake forgets his instinct to value everything human. Instead of promoting his own genes, creates a new race that is not better endowed with paths to human definitions of happiness, but that objectively works more logically.