Feels very similar to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Its almost like they have the same author)

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, reads a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale.  While Oryx and Crake third person narrated, it shares a lot of stylistic elements.  For instance, flashback is used as a major story-telling device and although the novel is in present tense, the past constitutes most of the novel up to section 5.  There are two timelines of narration, the Jimmy time, the past, and the Snowman time, the present, but both names refer to the same person (many characters have two names, but it’s not entirely clear why yet).  Each trip back in time reveals more about the characters I presume will play a larger role later in the story, but they do not completely connect to the Snowman time before section 5.

Time plays a big role in the novel thus far, whether it be about wasting time, age, or the past.  One example is when Snowman comes back from one of his flashbacks.  He thinks that he, “has to find better ways of occupying his time … and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.” (41).  He must hold onto the past, the familiar world, in order to forget about the new world, but he always ends up regretting his visits to a life that no longer exists.  He doesn’t choose to make a log book, because “any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past” (41).  The children of the new world, the Crakers as they are called, can’t read, so who would he be writing for?  On the other hand, he believes once, “the old words … [are] gone out of his head … they’ll be gone,” (68) which would support the effort to write.  Snowman’s beard is symbolic of this outdated existence; the new children weren’t designed with beards, but Snowman still has one, because it’s, “too late for him” (9).  It’s a bit depressing, because Snowman appears to be one of the last holdouts in a world that is trying to leave him behind, but the narrow scope of the narration may be misleading. 

Atwood’s use of flashback reads like a journal, which proves to be an interesting narration method, but I question its reliability.  Although it is third-person, many interjections exist in a journal or diary style, such as when Snowman “won’t dip a toe in [the lagoon] even at night, when the sun can’t get at him.  Revision: especially at night” (6).  This self-aware narration is reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, which is perhaps the root of my skepticism (even though The Handmaid’s Tale narration is first person).  The narrator goes on to question why, “[the children] never stand too close to him.  Is that from respect, as he’d like to think, or because he stinks?” (6).  Are these questions from the narrator, or do they suggest that Snowman is asking them and we know them through the narrator?  Later, the children “ask him to take off his sunglasses and put them back on again: they want to see whether he has two eyes really, or three.” (7).  Do the children really care whether he has two eyes or three, or does Snowman suspect that the children think this?  The effect continues when the narrator describes when Jimmy’s dad starts being in a more involved relationship with Ramona, one of his work partners.  Jimmy, “has much worse things on his conscience.  So who is he to blame them?  (he blames them)” (67).  These bits of information also reveal an element of stream of conscience in the story that complements the journal style; others examples are more intricate, like when Snowman tries talking back to a woman he thinks he hears and, “she can hear him, he needs to believe that, but she’s giving him the silent treatment” (11).  Snowman imagines the voice, because, “he feels the need to hear a human voice,” (10).  Throughout this first section of the novel, the narration style has an interesting feel to it; its reflective, yet seemingly omniscient.

Another motif introduced in this section is about pretending, which heightens my suspicion of reliability; it also plays on the potential theme that people always look to the past to cope with change.  Snowman frequently goes back on the idea of pretending that he learned in his first three years of school.  We get a good taste of Atwood’s tone here when the narrator describes, “Ms. Stratton Call-Me-Sally, with the big butt” (40) and the fantasies that Snowman has involving her (there are much more uncomfortable parts of the novel to read than that, trust me).  Another time, when filling up the bottles during the rain storm, he wishfully thinks, “let’s pretend this is a beer,” (45) to lighten the dismal mood, but ultimately, “He shouldn’t dangle impossibilities in front of himself” (45).  Even when he demands that, “’[He] [is] not [his] childhood,’” (68) he looks back into it when he, “pretends [he] live[s] in India, and [he’s] going to do a mantra” (68).  While I may have cheated slightly by finding out that the word “pretend” does not appear very often later in the novel, it appears to be a fairly significant idea in these first few sections.

We don’t know a lot about the characters in the novel so far (or at least how they are relevant to the Snowman time), but Atwood’s tone and style are already well illustrated.  The motif of time is clearly introduced and will surely continue to play a large role.  I am still skeptical of what point of view the narration is, though, and how reliable it may be, but this concern may be eased with time.