Oryx and Crake

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The plot structure, point of view, and characterization in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake encourage readers to sympathize with the protagonist and to overlook his ethical flaws. The story alternates between the present experiences of Snowman (seemingly the last human survivor in an ecologically devastated world) and Snowman's youth before the catastrophe, focusing the reader's attention on how the catastrophe came about. The third-person narration focalized through Snowman, and the round, mimetically-satisfying characterization of Snowman, likely create sympathy for him and divert attention away from the omissions in his awareness of events and his own ethical culpability. The novel's climax, however, may spur the reader to recognize some of Snowman's gaps in self-awareness, and this may trigger the reader's reevaluation of Snowman's character as a whole.

Margaret Atwood belongs to those few writers who have the same success of "spud" of the field as a realist literature and fiction. Actually, she Atwood, winner of the Booker Prize, would not recognize that he is writing fiction - but where to go, if the books themselves on this show! Moreover, it joined several features of subgenres: p fiction, cyberpunk novel of growing up.

At the same time the book Atwood little resemblance to the typical English-language fiction, where the adventures of the body interspersed with or completely replace the spirit of adventure, while the events make the reader feel any more than a message about bad weather in some Zanzibar. Atwood's prose is full to the limit and realistic - perhaps this is one of the secrets of her success. Reading about genetic experiments, their wonderful and terrible results of a world in which the disaster has left almost no people - reading all this, we inevitably find ourselves there.

"On the horizon to the east gray haze has covered pink merciless glare. Strange: the color still seems tender. On the background of smoke darkened silhouettes of the towers on the high seas, inexplicably grow from pale blue and pink lagoon. The cries of birds nesting there and the distant rattle of the ocean that gnaws the wreckage of cars, bricks and stones - almost like the roar of engines at the weekend" (Atwood, 100-130).

The protagonist of Oryx and Corncrake "calls himself snowmen, although once he had another name - Jimmy. By the time of our acquaintance with him he had already suffered much, including - total epidemic, after which the Earth was nearly empty of people. The exception is the so-called "Children of the corncrake - farmed Homo, which are no longer, but belong to another new species. They are resistant to ultraviolet, eat only plants, not aggressive it. Yeti has to fulfill the role of a nanny, a kind of serpent-loser in a cluttered Eden.

Margaret Atwood has written a very violent novel, novel, a sobering and makes us a different perspective not only our future but the present. World described by it, is quite believable - and, alas, sooner or later can become a reality. Mankind, drawn biotechnology, likening ...