Why did crake

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Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Oryx and Crake , which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. Snowman is limping because of his injured foot, and is making poor time.

At the height of day he must find shade and rest until the heat breaks. His own voice speaks in his head. In a kind of delirium, he once again expresses regret and guilt over his participation in whatever horrors Crake committed.

Yet in blaming Crake he also disavows his own responsibility in what happened. He is being passive now even as he was when allowing himself to work for the corporations in the past. Active Themes. One Saturday, Jimmy is lying in his bed in the AnooYoo compound. He is unmotivated and depressed. Someone rings his doorbell and he tells whomever it is to go away. Crake responds—Jimmy realizes Crake is the only person he wanted to see.

Crake has passes to visit the Pleeblands, which means he must be very important. He tells Jimmy he wants to go out bar hopping in the pleeblands with him.

Before they leave Crake injects Jimmy with a cocktail of medicines that are meant to immunize Jimmy against diseases common in the pleeblands. The injection Crake gives Jimmy seems a precaution against diseases found outside the compounds—but in fact it will save him from a more dangerous virus made inside in the compound. Jimmy has only ever seen the pleeblands from the window of a bullet train and is nervous at first.

He is comforted when he realizes the inhabitants of the pleeblands are not the mentally deficient criminals compounders make them out to be. Crake tells Jimmy the whole trip is on him.

They get drinks, dinner, and buy services from various prostitutes. The next morning Jimmy vaguely remembers Crake telling him about a job for Jimmy at RejoovenEsense, and thinks he must have accepted. We finally get to see what the pleeblands are really like. Even outside of the compounds, the corporate presence is undeniable. Jimmy accepts a job from Crake, but can barely remember doing so.

When Jimmy returns to AnooYoo on Monday, several higher-ups congratulate him on his new job. His mistresses have already been informed of his departure, and have sent him sorrowful goodbye emails. Jimmy realizes Crake has a long reach and must be quite powerful. The power of Crake and his corporation begin to sink in. Crake has obviously been keeping tabs on Jimmy. The RejoovenEsense compound is the most beautiful compound Jimmy has ever seen.

Crake gives him a tour of the facilities and takes him out to lunch. Jimmy asks for more detail. Crake says the research budget is many millions of dollars.

Selling immortality is not a new concept in this world—other corporations have already tried various methods of offering people longer life even infinitely longer through science.

Crake has managed to get virtually unlimited funding for his project—immortality is worth a great deal of money. Related Quotes with Explanations. Within Paradice, Crake explains, there are two initiatives. The pill would also be a contraceptive, depriving men and women of their fertility, but this would not be advertised. The sterilization would solve the problem of overpopulation, and lead to greater freedom and happiness, says Crake.

He believes the BlyssPluss pill is a solution to human suffering—and it does seem to offer some pretty great benefits! Yet it also essentially involves a tremendous secret scientific experiment on a large and unknowing swath of the population. It is a case of Crake, through science, playing god—determining what is best for other people, for the rest of the world.

In his view, mass sterilization will solve overpopulation, and is therefore a good thing despite it being done to people without their knowledge. The more Jimmy thinks about it the more he thinks he could use a pill like this one, but stops short of saying so to Crake.

He agrees with Crake that the pill would become a must-have all over the world; that it would be irresistible. Jimmy asks where Crake is going to get his test subjects, and Crake smiles as he tells him they will test it in poorer countries. When Jimmy asks how he fits into this project, Crake tells him that he is in charge of the advertising campaign.

Not only is Crake selling the pill without disclosing all of its effects, he is testing it on communities who are too poor, desperate, or troubled to think twice about accepting money to test a new drug. After lunch Crake and Jimmy go to Paradice. It is located in an air-locked dome that is basically impenetrable. The employees are wearing nametags with the names of extinct animals on them.

Crake explains that everyone who works in Paradice is an Extinctathon grand master. They are geniuses with genetic splicing, and had previously been using their skills to introduce damaging microbes and viruses into corporate biological products. Crake intimates that certain employees had failed to integrate smoothly, and had been eliminated.

Crake has absorbed members of a rebellious, anti corporate group into his project—taking advantage of their skill and intelligence while at the same time neutralizing the threat that they pose. He has consolidated his power in a big way. The irony of their being named after extinct animals, while unknowingly working towards the extinction of humankind, is painfully deep.

Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Oryx and Crake can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read. The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. They are strikingly beautiful, with perfect features and flawless skin that is immune to UV damage.

They have a digestive system similar to that of a rabbit, so they can survive on a wide variety of simple vegetation, so food is not scarce. Romantic love has been bred out of them entirely: sex occurs as a purely reproductive act, once every three years per female. When a female Crake is ovulating, she gives off a pheromone scent and her backside turns blue this trait is borrowed from baboons. Then males know they can pursue her sexually, but if a male is not chosen he does not feel any disappointment or anger.

The rest of the time, the Crakes are basically sexless, and sexual or romantic frustration is completely absent in them. Crake also tried to breed religion, history, and art out of the Crakers, but it appears he has been unsuccessful. They also begin, towards the end of the novel, to make art—they build a likeness of Snowman in the hopes that it will help him to return safely from his trip.

For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:. Chapter 5 Quotes. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. Chapter 7 Quotes. Related Characters: Crake , The Crakers. Chapter 14 Quotes. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Chapter 3. He cannot cool down at the nearby stream and watering hole, because the Craker s play in it, and they make him feel grotesque and ask him too many questions Chapter 5. Snowman has told the Craker s the story of their origin.

He has told them that the Craker s themselves are the Craker children hear him and ask him why he is talking to himself. He tells them Snowman hears the voices of the Craker s coming toward him. How chillingly familiar does that sound about the hordes of twenty-something engineers today? Take Crake. The problem is humanity; the solution, its extermination and replacement.

But Atwood leaves several morsels scattered throughout the novel that may suggest something different. Later in life, Crake learns that the biotechnology companies have not merely been curing disease, but creating it as well, in the hope of ensuring their continued existence in an illness free world.

Crake confesses this realization to Jimmy with the hypothesis that his father did not, in fact, commit suicide in the pleeblands, but was done in by his superiors.

But we get the sense, at that end, that perhaps what Crake views as human problem is not humanity but inhumanity. His desire to exterminate the human race is less about bettering the species but, instead, about extirpating hatred, violence, and jealously—and, of course, getting a little revenge.

This is, perhaps, why he hires Jimmy—the cryer, the feeler—to join RejoovenEssence and leaves him as the sole survivor. He could join the survivors and potentially murder all of the Crakers—rebuilding the human world of before, warts and all. The right answer tests our commitment to one of two ideals: civilization or the future.

Jacob S. One of the other things is CLB Fellow, What almost always comes is muddling through, not the end of the world or even our species. But dystopias make much better stories. Play Icon Play icon in a circular border.