Alyssa Petsinis
ENG-1D1
Mrs. Kok
Friday, April 17th, 2015
Social, political, and humanistic issues presented in Oryx and Crake and how they affect our world today Throughout the novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood has illustrated a dystopian world where the humans and hybrid/crossbreed animals can coexist without harm. The setting has taken place in the future, and Atwood has foreshadowed many interesting things, where animals will have to become extinct to fill some gaps in the food chain, and then humans will has to fill that gap with their creations of modified creators. Furthermore, Atwood suggests and brings up multiple ideas that she predicts our future. Atwood is trying to express what our future may look like throughout the text, but there are some things in Oryx and Crake that are already seen throughout our world and in our society today. There is a tendency in human nature to allow the social, political, and humanistic issues in our world rule our everyday lives. This is presented throughout this entire novel; these issues have a major impact on many people and the society in general, and Margret Atwood uses this to warn us about our society, and the issues presented in this novel can become if not already are issues in our world. Firstly, In Oryx and Crake Margret Atwood describes a world not like our own. Although it is not clearly describes and or mentioned in the text, one can infer the number one power in the world is corporations. In Atwood’s novel it is the compounds that have entire control and power over the world. Each compound is independent and self-contained. They produce their own supplies like market food, medicine, and they create their own entertainment. This allows them to make rules and regulations for them, it’s almost like each one is its own country; evidence of this is presented in references to the locations throughout the book. Jimmy spends his life living in corporate compounds, the compound is for society’s finest, the upper class members of society, on the opposite end the pleeblands is for everyone else. The compounds each build themselves up to complete total dominance, to have the most power possible. These companies and cooperation are beneath corporate control and they enforce the power they have through a highly skilled and trained system of paid armed forces like the CorpSeCorps men, and could care less about the public interest. Jimmy, the main character has lived in the compounds his entire life he has always seen the compounds as having too much control. This is shown when Jimmy first finds out about HealthWyzer when his mother was complaining “She complained about the tight security at the HealthWyzer gates- the guards were ruder, they were suspicious of everyone, they liked to strip search people, woman especially. They got a kick out of it, she said” (Atwood 53). This quote shows the abusive power that the cooperation have, they invade people’s personal space and privacy. Also, although it is not mentioned in text we can see that the pleeblanders are essentially a larger customer base for the corporations in the compounds. With this knowledge we can start making assumptions that if our world is an extrapolation of its own; we ourselves are currently living as pleeblanders. Sometimes now and then, we hand over our power over to the corporations. We allow them the power to overrule and become the controlling associates of our society. The pleeblanders keep handing over money to the cooperation’s, with the amount they give them they are able to uphold and maintain their position as societies top ranked. Just like us we give the big cooperation like McDonalds, Tim Horton’s, Nike etc., enormous amounts of power and money, they have so much control when in actuality they shouldn’t, and with this current status everyone else suffers. Margret Atwood is showing us how too much power and control in society can lead to chaos and suffering. It can lead to total dominance and
