Oryx and Crake (Abitur Englisch LK Essay Outline)

Snowman, living up in a tree, struggles to remember his past and who he is. One main aspect is him being a so-called words person, and not a numbers person. How Atwood depicts Snowman’s lonesome situation can be explored as by when he has the utterances and their individual meaning.

1. Paragraph: (General info on word person and Snowman/Jimmy — Background knowledge) Snowman tries to hold on to who he is, or at least who he used to be: a words person.

• in library job after graduation he learned “hard” words by heart to use in his every day vocabulary
• pg 230: “He memorised these hoary locutions, tossed them left-handed into conversation: wheelwright, lodestone, saturnine, adamant. He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
• utters random fragments of sentences in post-apocalyptic world to remember who he used to be
• pg 43: “From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can’t reach the word. He can’t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space.”
• pg 78: “ ‘Hang on to the words,’ he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”
• he spent the majority of his life reading and learning words and keeping them
• pg 175: “He wishes he had something to read. To read, to view, to hear, to study, to compile. Rag ends of language are floating in his head: mephitic, metronome, mastitis, metatarsal, maudlin. ‘I used to be erudite,’ he says out loud. Erudite. A hopeless word. What are all those things he once thought he knew, and where have they gone?”
• he is depressed over having nothing to read and also being the perhaps only person left on earth to be able to write and read
  • he spent his life learning things that now are completely unimportant in this new, post-apocalyptic world — his skills are useless

2. Paragraph: Snowman hears instructions-like statements and commands whenever he is in a situation where he doesn't know what to do or how to cope/deal with it.

• when explaining things to the Crakers, sentences pop up giving instructions to Snowman on how to not introduce too many different unknown things, as the Crakers do not have the capacity to process it
• pg 111: “When dealing with indigenous peoples, says the book in his head — a more modern book this time, late twentieth century, the voice a confident female’s — you must attempt to respect their traditions and confine your explanations to simple concepts that can be understood within the contexts of their belief system.”
• Snowman tries to bring some normality and instruction into his depressing presence by remembering his self-help books that he read in college
• pg 4-5: “ ‘It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and preservation of sanity,’ he says out loud. (…) ‘In view of the mitigating,’ he says. He finds himself standing with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to eat a mango.”
  • he tries to keep his sanity
• pg 51: “It is important, says the book in his head, to ignore minor irritants, to avoid pointless repinings, and to turn one’s mental energies to immediate realities and to the tasks at hand. He must have read that somewhere. Surely his own mind would never have come up with pointless repinings, not all by itself. (…) As often, he feels he has a listener: someone unseen, hidden behind the screen of leaves, watching him slyly.”
  • he wishes for a listener : the desperate wish for real conversation, for communication and interaction with persons capable of understanding him
• pg 279: “This surely was the lesson taught to us by history. The higher the hurdle the greater the jump. Having to face a crisis causes you to grow as a person. ‘I haven't grown as a person, you cretin,’ Snowman shouts. ‘Look at me! I’ve shrunk! My brain is the size of a grape!’ But he doesn't know which is bigger or smaller, because there’s nobody to measure himself by.”
  • he is slowly loosing his grip on reality, he cannot evaluate his own surroundings, i.e. what is real and what not
  • due to loss of his vocabulary, he isn't intellectually challenged anymore — feels stultification occurring
• pg 77-78: “ ‘I am not my childhood,’ Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can’t turn them off, he can’t change the subject, he can’t leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. They’d had that in grade school. Religion of the Week. All right, class, now quiet as mice, that means you, Jimmy. Today we’re going to pretend we live in India, and we’re going to do a mantra.”
  • desperately trying to not lose his mind and keep inner peace

3. Paragraph: Snowman hears utterances in his head, whenever he feels depressed and lonely, i.e. when he needs someone to talk to or comfort.

• these strands of now useless information comes to Snowman whenever he feels truly lonesome or nostalgic, also when in pain
  • pg 11: “ ‘Now I’m alone,’ he says out loud. ‘All, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea.’ One more scrap from the burning scrapbook in his head. Revision: seashore.”
  • as earlier mentioned: scared of stultification, revises words
• pg 47: “(…) he could focus on his living conditions. (…) More food sources, for one thing. Why didn't he ever bone up on roots and berries and pointed-stick traps for skewering small game, and how to eat snakes? Why had he wasted his time? Oh honey, don't beat yourself up! breathes a female voice, regretfully, in his ear.”
  • as mentioned earlier: he spent his life learning things that now are completely unimportant in this new, post-apocalyptic world — his skills are useless, yet he spends the majority of his time remembering people, words, situations instead of living his current situation
• pg 26: “(…) Snowman himself isn't old enough for this, this — what can it be called? This situation. He’ll never be old enough, no sane human being could ever … Each one of us must tread the path laid out before him, or her, says the voice inside his head, a man’s this time, a style bogus guru, and each path is unique. It is not the nature of the path itself that should concern the seeker, but the grace and strength and patience with which each and every one of us follows the sometimes challenging… ‘Stuff it,’ says Snowman. Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits. Though he has the nagging feeling that he may well have written this gem himself. In happier days, naturally. Oh, so much happier.”
  • he feels absolutely helpless: he cannot fathom his situation and doesn't feel prepared or mature enough to deal with this
• pg 306: “On the worst nights he'd call up Alex the parrot, long dead by then but still walking and talking on the Net, and watch him go through his paces. Handler: What color is the round ball, Alex? The round ball? Alex, head on side, thinking: Blue. (…) Seeing this would bring tears to Jimmy’s eyes. Then he’d stay up too late, and once in bed he’d stare at the ceiling, telling over his lists of obsolete words for the comfort that was in them. Dibble. Aphasia. Breast plough. Enigma. Gat. If Alex the parrot was his, they’d be friends, they'd be brothers. He’d teach him more words. Knell. Kern. Alack.”
  • “on the worst nights”: falling back to worst phases of depression he tries to relive youth memories and find comfort in those, e.g. words and Alex the parrot

Conclusion: Snowman extensively tries to keep the memory of who he used to be by holding on and revising words to himself. This repetition of words, which create a sense of comfort for him, helps him cope with his situation of living in a post-apocalyptic world to a certain extent and helps him deal with his depression. Because of the lack of communication, Snowman talks to himself or communicates with voices repeating passages of self-help books, which he studied at University. Snowman’s affinity with words had the significant role of Crake’s successful plan: he was responsible for the advertisement of the BlyssPluss pill. His close affinity with words making him a so-called “word person” made him support Crake’s plan of eradicating human kind and establish a life for the Children of Crake. He was the one who advertised the pill that led to ultimate destruction.