Viewpoint Characters: Painting in Gestalt with Oryx and Crake

For a book with such unsubtle themes, there’s a lot of subtlety in how Oryx and Crake approaches its story. In fact, Margaret Atwood chooses to do a lot of her storytelling simply through perspective. A lesser novel might lean on heavy foreshadowing to tell the reader about an approaching apocalypse, or simply allow the event to surprise the reader, but Atwood does neither: the ultimate end of human civilization, despite being the defining element of the book, has not yet been mentioned once (I’ve read as far as the beginning of Part Five). Instead, the event—the unknown, unnamed calamitous event which destroys humanity—is portrayed in gestalt. The novel has two characters from whose perspective we see the story: Jimmy and Snowman. These are the same man—simply a “before” version and an “after” version.

“Before” and “after” what? The trivial answer is that Jimmy came before Snowman, and Snowman came after Jimmy, but that ignores the deeper answer. The book opens on a man—Snowman—struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by a new race of colourful children; the story subsequently flashes back to his childhood, when he was not Snowman, but Jimmy. Jimmy’s purpose in this novel is to slowly answer the questions Snowman leaves us with. I’d say that the book began “in medias res,” but that would be inaccurate. “In medias res” means “in the middle of the thing,” and what we’re observing, by proxy of Snowman, is the aftermath of the “thing.” Snowman lets us know what the thing did, but Jimmy begins to spin the story of what the thing is. In fact, generally speaking, it is Snowman’s job to introduce us to ideas, and Jimmy’s to explain them to us.

Jimmy’s story takes place in a future Earth. Jimmy’s first job as a character is to tell us about this Earth; we learn from him that the world has become a sort of dystopia. Jimmy himself lives well enough, but the world outside his secluded corporate village is dangerous. Inside, genetic engineers are toying with the building blocks of life. Their purposes seem wholesome enough, but when an engineered strain of virus is weaponized and used against a guard, the reader begins to grow wary of genetic engineering. Beyond technology, even the morals of society seem to have degraded, with Jimmy and his friend Crake watching depraved pornography and snuff films in their spare time. This contrast between the dystopian human world and the almost Edenesque way that the postapocalyptic world seems to be treating its new inhabitants, even as Snowman struggles to survive, plants in our mind the idea of some great reversal—some massive event combining the death of one race with the birth of another.

Snowman has introduced us to Crake by this point—well, introduced in the sense that Snowman introduces anything. We learn that he’s cast Crake as some sort of god to the colourful children who inhabit the new world. In fact, they’re called “Crakers,” which seems to suggest that there’s a kernel of truth in the story he told them, where Crake had created them. After all, most myths have a root in reality, and Jimmy’s depiction of Crake seems to back this one up. Crake is described as being full of potential, and combined with his relevance to the post-apocalyptic land of Snowman, this indicates that he had some major role in the events leading up to Snowman’s desolated world. The duality of Jimmy’s and Snowman’s views of him create a feeling of anticipation. We know he’s going to do something—but what? Not to mention that he’s a title character. That’s another way that Atwood lets us know he’s going to be very important.

This brings me to the topic of the other title character, Oryx. Once again, we first meet Oryx through the lens of Snowman. Snowman clearly has deep feelings for Oryx, but now, like Crake, she’s gone. At first glance, Oryx doesn’t appear to be as relevant as Crake to Armageddon—that being said, there are subtle clues. Oryx and Crake have both been written into Snowman’s little mythology that he shared with the Crakers. Snowman’s mythos describe Crake as having created the Crakers, and Oryx as having created all the other animals. Obviously, Crake’s relationship with the Crakers is more mysterious than Oryx’s with her children—there have been animals long before there was Oryx. Nonetheless, Oryx and Crake are the ones he credits with the new world order, at least to the Crakers. Oryx and Crake are the names on the cover of the book. Oryx and Crake—together—are important to the unasked question of the novel: What happened?

Now, Oryx isn’t as developed as Crake by this point. While Jimmy has, in a sense, met her, he’s only seen her briefly in a horrific foreign child pornography film, but we already know that “Oryx and Crake” aren’t a duo yet. There’s some kind of first contact which the reader hasn’t been made privy to yet, but the mere fact that Atwood has so closely tied their names together gives us a sense of destiny. Some inexorable force draws them together, and because we know about this, we are in suspense as to how they meet and what they do together. And the two ways we’ve seen Oryx—through Snowman’s eyes and through Jimmy’s—let us know about this predestination.

Through the use of two separate perspectives, Atwood creates tension regarding several elements of the novel: the apocalypse, Crake, and Oryx. By painting a “before” and “after” picture, Atwood renders the reader desperate to find out what took place between the two; and how so much change could take place. It’s human nature—just think about those weight loss advertisements with the before and after picture. Change, when hidden, creates curiosity. And this is how Margaret Atwood creates suspense: through Snowman and Jimmy.