9th Reflection: Crake's goal

   Many people, when they first knew that Crake released a virus that destroyed humanity, would think of Crake as a villain.  However, Crake is not the average villain who plans to destroy the humanity so that he could gain something.  All he wants is to speed up the self-destruction of the ever more corrupted and evil human society.  Very likely, he plots his own death to make Jimmy the only one surviving to lead the Crakers.  

Will the Crakers live in utopia?

   Why does he do this, many of us would ask.  Why would any person kill themselves , especially one who is so clever, respected, and wealthy?  I asked the same question, and my best answer to this question is that Crake cares more for his plan to remake society than for his own life.  He wants the Crakers to live independently from human influence, and in order to do that, he kills almost every human, including his lover Oryx and himself.  The only one he chose to survive is Jimmy, to whom he entrusts the job of guarding the Crakers as they grow and develop their own society.  

   What Crake wanted is a civilization free from all the evil human things, such as killing, theft, rape or religion.  He wanted the Crakers to return to nature, to consume grass and plants, and to live without fear and anger and all those negative emotions.  In a way, he achieved that, and the Crakers, if they survive and behave as Crake predicted, will be better people than we are.  

8th Reflection: the end

*Spoiler Alert!*

  I just finished reading the novel, and I hate the ending of the novel.  It just feels so, anti-climatic.  Maybe it's because I've read too briefly, but a lot of the things felt unexplained.  What was Crake's true motivation?  What was Crake's plan?  Why did Crake kill Oryx? Who are the 3 people that are on the beach?  There are a lot of things the author didn't explain clearly, and I don't like the feeling of having a book end so abruptly.
  Moreover, the pacing felt wrong at the end.  Atwood spent so much time, so many pages building up the suspense of the apocalypse, and then, it just happened.  There was nothing dramatic, nothing entertaining, just dying and dying for a couple of pages while Jimmy hides in a hole.  Crake and Oryx left, and then returned.  Sure, there was blood on their clothes, but no mentioning of what happened, no explaining whatsoever.  If Crake planned to kill Oryx all along, why didn't he do it outside, not in front of Jimmy's eyes?  When Jimmy saw Crake kill Oryx, even if he had his suspicions of Crake, why couldn't he have waited a bit longer for Crake to explain his motivation?
  As I was reading, I began to like Oryx and Crake for its strange world and the various connections to ours. However, the ending of it is really bad in my opinion.  Maybe I have been careless in my reading and forgot obvious clues the author had been planting, but the ending just doesn't leave a satisfying echo in my mind.  Some people may prefer the open-ended approach, in which anything is possible.  However, I am not one of them.

Reflection #7: Status

Symbols of status and wealth

   When Jimmy was invited by Crake to RejoovenEsense, his status elevated.  His former employers, who once treated him an ad writer, treated him as we would treat a person who had just won the Nobel prize.  This is yet another aspect of the sad modern world that Atwood tries to portray: that people are being treated not for who they are as human beings, but for what jobs they have and how much cash they have in their pockets.
   Jimmy was never anybody important, but once Crake invited him to RejoovenEsense, he joined the higher class.  He became respected and people started to suck up to him.  This sub-plot feels familiar, and I remember reading Mark Twain's "A Million Pound Bank Note".  In Twain's short story, the protagonist Henry Adams was very similar to Jimmy.  He was poor and of lower class.  However, once he demonstrated that he had a million pound bank note, he was respected, and many shops GAVE him things such as expensive suites, without even asking for money right after he demonstrated the bank note.

   People respect others with status, even though that status may be false, and it is often funny to see someone who was once superior sucking up to someone who was in an inferior position.  It is also quite sad.  However, that is how the society today works.  You either keep your head low, or you get trampled on.

Sixth Relection: extreme capitalism

The story of Oryx and Crake featured a society ruled by corporations, and the author uses this to express the how much horror can extreme capitalism cause.  Oryx lived a pitiful childhood.  Her entire village lived off human trafficking -- of their own children.  However, there was nothing for them to do, and these people even do this voluntarily, because there was no other way for them to earn enough money to live.  

It's all about money.

Under the extreme capitalism, in one part of the world, people are so poor that they need to sell their children to stay alive.  On the other side, however, there are people rich enough and bored enough that they want to see live executions for entertainment.  This great gap between the poor and the rich is a direct consequence of extreme capitalism.  The rich becomes richer, and the poor becomes poorer.  Democracy and morality no longer exist as people struggle for cash, and the world becomes an oligarchy.  

When the social gaps are this big, and the poor suffers so much, it is only expected that some person, or some group of individuals will lead a revolution to change that system.

Fifth reflection: Being God

Being superior to others, is it really good?

    I always thought being a god, one individual that has more knowledge and more power than any other in the world, would be pretty cool.  I would become the high and mighty, and everyone would fear and respect me.  However, after reading the paragraph in Oryx and Crake about Snowman and the various ways that he created a religion-like thing among the crakers, I feel that being god is not fun at all.  

  Snowman is very lonely, and there is no one of his status whom he could talk to.  All that he sees are intellectually inferior beings.  While he may feel that he has the most power, there is no place to use that kind of power.  In a world without the things he was used to, like chocolate and beer, what can he do with the prestige?  It is like putting a grown adult amidst a group of 4-year-olds.  They respect you, but you cannot have a proper conversation, and you cannot have what you would like to have.  No one in Snowman's world has the technology to make electronics, the knowledge to write books, or the experience to cook food such as chocolate.   He may be important, but he enjoys life so much less.  For these reasons, I would much rather be a middle class individual in an advanced society than a lonely god in some primitive world.  

   

Fourth Reflection

Snowman's memories seems very biased.  He is not an objective storyteller, and many of Snowman's memories are foggy.  This is probably due to the fact that Snowman is alone and isolated to the point of constant hallucination..

Crake's namesake, the red-necked crake

For example, when he introduces Crake into the story, when Crake was still Glenn, Snowman mentions how Glenn had been hiding dark intentions from the start,  "the Crake side of him must have been there from the beginning, thinks Snowman.".  This is not true, as while Crake is different and appears more mature, he does not exhibit dark thoughts or intentions.  Crake was simply very competitive and dedicated, even when playing games such as the Extinctathon.  Even though his thoughts are not portrayed, I believe that Crake had less dark thoughts than Jimmy, who even at the time was behaving strangely due to the influences of his parents.

Third Reflection

  Another class has passed since last time, and I still need to catch with reading.  Currently, I am doing a short presentation about genetic engineering in the book, and the examples I have used is the pigoons.  Of course, there are many others in the book that I mights have used, like wolvogs or rakunks.  However, pigoons do seem to be the one type of animal that is written most about, and it is easier to imagine the pigoon, the giant pink pig with multiple organs that humans can easily take for human transplant.  It does feel very imhumane to used animals as factories for which we produce our organs, but at the same time, humans are never merciful towards animals.  How many people out of the total population are vegetarians?  How many ate some form of meat? Those meat came from animals that we have killed, and to me, death is worse than anything else, including being used as an organ producing machine.  What are your opinions?

Second reflection

    In this week, I have read the first two chapters.  Yes, I am a very slow reader, but this is about the book, not me.
    Anyway, this book, or at least the first two chapters, are quite surprising, with some unexpected turns and twists.  The storytelling itself is quite neat, albeit somewhat confusing with many layers of flashbacks.  However, the character that the story portrays is somewhat frustrating to see.  At the start of the book, I thought that I would sympathize with snowman, or Jimmy, since he IS the protagonist and also the only know survivor of some apocalypse.  However, I was pulled through the pages by listening to Jimmy ranting about his childhood fascinations, and that made me think that Jimmy is pitiful.  However, there is a Chinese proverb saying that "a pathetic person must have done something to deserve it".  In Chinese, it is :"可怜人必有可恨之处".  Jimmy seems to care for the pigoons, but he doesn't really try to help them.  He isn't stupid, but he pretends to be when his mother tries to educate him.  He loves his mother, but instead of trying to cheering her up, he does his best to infuriate her, just to see she react.  In a way, Jimmy treats his mother look some kind of toy.  He does things, bad things to the toy, just to see what would happen.  This led me to believe that his actions may exacerbated his mother's problems, and lead to some future tragedy.  There is no evidence to this, just a hunch from reading and seeing many cliché stories.

First Reflection

    The book I chose to read is Oryx and Crake.  I chose this book because I was invited to read it by some nice friends, but also because it features a dystopian world which appears to be very interesting.  I hope that I can, through this book, gain a new perspective on cooprations.  My inquiry question for this project would probably be related to the conflict between human and nature, about our attempts to change nature and the consequences that followed.