Character Analysis

Oryx

            Oryx is a girl who was born in a very small poor village and at an early age was sold so her mother could provide for her remaining siblings. Oryx made her way from one owner to the next, initially working as a flower sales girl, then a sexually exploited youth, until she was finally tracked down by Crake and worked for him as a teacher for the Crakers. Oryx grew up learning how to control others. Oryx regularly plays as the innocent girl and makes others around her feel as if they have the power in the relationship, when really it is Oryx who holds the power. Oryx is able to get what she wants out of others by manipulating them. Throughout the novel Oryx is emotionally distant and each time that Jimmy asks questions to get some emotional response from her Oryx tends to dance around the question, giving an answer that has no insight into what Oryx feels. She tends to neither dwell on the past nor look much into the future; she instead lives in the day. The only time where she expresses a longing in time is the anticipation of the Crakers being made public. Despite her being unemotional, Oryx establishes a relationship with Jimmy and although she does not say it, Jimmy knows that the relationship is the most “real” thing that either of them have ever been involved in.

            There is also the possibility that Oryx is not at all who she says she is. It is entirely possible that nothing that Oryx said in the novel is true and therefore this character analysis is useless. The possibility that Oryx is merely an actor is ever present. Crake could have just found a girl who closely resembles the girl from the video Crake and Jimmy watched as a kid and used her as a substitute because he knew it would affect Jimmy. In all of the conversations that are shown in the novel between Oryx and Jimmy, Jimmy directs all the conversations to extract the responses he wants. Oryx could just be catering to Jimmy’s desires and telling him what he wants to hear when really none of those things ever happened, to her at least. There by making none of it real. But what is real?

Jimmy’s Mom/Crake’s Father

            Although both of these characters are said to be paranoid and out of touch with modern society these are two of the most humane characters in the novel. These two openly rebel against what has become the social norm of society and the compounds in the novel. It is this rebellion against the social norms that gets both of these characters executed within novel. It is also the loss of these two characters that emotionally shape the two protagonists of this story early on in the novel, Jimmy and Crake. These characters function as a base for how the protagonists create their moral standards. Where Jimmy does things, many times hurtful, his desire is not to inflict harm on others but to illicit some form of response. As Jimmy grows through the novel he develops this more to illicit specific responses he wants at the time. For Crake the execution of his father early on ingrains in his mind how cruel this world is and is then, due to the emotional bond with his father and the sense of betrayal from his mother, grows up in hunger for vengeance of what the world took from him.

How has this book changed your views on the threat level of biological weapons?