Life In Oryx And Crake By Margaret Atwood

The way life works out for many of us is less a matter of chance than choice. The choice of people we decide to involve ourselves with in our lives are the ones who are going to impact our lives, for the better or the worse. All people we meet teach us something, about themselves or about ourselves. Sometimes the lessons can be fleeting and sometimes they stay with us for life. So, how do we choose the people to associate with? Further, what happens when those whom we spend a lot of time with are connected to us through birth? The novel Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, explores how the life of the protagonist Jimmy is influenced by particular people--whether his mother Sharon, his friend Crake, or his lover Oryx--and how these people continue …show more content…
When he was a youngster, she expected him to be brilliant and understand her work. “She often tried to explain things to him; then she got discouraged… He resisted her, he pretended he didn’t understand even when he did, he acted stupid, but he didn’t want her to give up on him” (21). Even as a young boy, he wanted love, the love she could not always offer. As children we know that all parents, especially all mothers experience real anger. Snowman’s mother felt that society believed women were meant to stay at home and not believed to be doing serious work. Sharon was once an extremely regarded scientist, but she became disillusioned with the work she was doing and quit, claiming that she simply “wanted to stay home with Jimmy” (30), but she enjoyed working full time and seemed happier than after she quit. Jimmy never does find out the reason behind that decision. Sharon sometimes use to do research on her computer with the work that remained. Jimmy notices that when she works: “She seemed to be enjoying herself, she was friendly then, too. She was like a real mother and her was like a real child” (30). When Jimmy’s mother acted like the perfect mother jimmy was usually frightened by the image of her. The lack of compassion from his mother towards him made him act out the way he does with his past relationship’s. Jimmy was going out with a woman named Amanda Payne and he was only …show more content…
They were a very few people that he had a human connection with. Crake and Jimmy became friends and close when Jimmy’s mother left. “Crake was among… [the] handful of Jimmy’s friends that his mother liked” (69). Having his mother’s approval may have stimulated this friendship, since he needed some companionship who he could spend time with. They duo would enter and see very violent and explicit websites “dirtysockpuppets.com” (82) “Shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowliv.com” (83) or “HottTotts” (89) all afternoon. They discover a little girl named Oryx who they saw on pornographic videos. Both jimmy and Crake draw their attention to her. This could be said as one thing they had in similar interest. Oryx had a different life than crake and jimmy. They both have a different version of her, but Oryx was just too different from them. Oryx would always see everything in an optimistic way, while Jimmy would see events in a positive way, and Crake would see them realistically. Regardless Oryx went through a lot of tough events, yet she only sees them in a positive manner, that everything happened to her for a reason. When she was sold to the pornography place, the other children were scared but she herself made the best out of it. She pointed out that “Every child should have love, every person should have it” (126) because these kids had nothing, so she thought having money is better than “[having] neither