Dystopian Novels – Oryx and Crake Essay
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“Writers provide glimpses of other worlds, giving readers opportunities to reflect on their own world”. To what extent do you agree with this view?
Dystopian novels provide glimpses into a world unknown to us and give readers the opportunity to reflect on their own world. In the novel Oryx and Crake, author Margaret Atwood uses literary features, imagery and emotive language which encourage the reader to see glimpses of other worlds in order to allow us to explore the ethical issues raised. These techniques share an impact on the reader which enables them to reflect on their own world and how it differs from those in the novel.
Dystopian novels are those in which everything is unpleasant, bad or environmentally degraded in an imagined place or state. The novel Oryx and Crake mainly focuses on the dystopic ideas of Margaret Atwood and explores developments of biological and genetic experiments. By including a dystopian setting, it allows the reader to imagine other worlds they are getting a glimpse of. It is the nature of the dystopia that provides the tension in the novel. From the beginning of the text, it is evident that communities are separated into divisions: the pleeblands and compounds. It is apparent that people living in the compounds live a more luxurious and successful life. Whereas people living in the pleeblands were classed as the poorer society. As science became a capitalistic field, meaning more money was being paid for more technological advancements, and as the arts became more useless in the monetary sense, the people themselves separated. Due to this separation, communication between societies began to weaken and thus disaster began to strike. “Despite the fingerprint identity cards now carried by everyone, public security in the pleeblands was leaky: there were people cruising around in those places who forge anything and who might be anybody, not to mention the loose change–the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies”. This quote proves the segregation of society and how it is unimaginable to people of today in our world. It allows us insight into a world where everything we take for granted is taken away from us.
Throughout the novel, Atwood includes many different literary techniques which encourage the reader to see glimpses into other worlds. One of these techniques is the extended use of imagery. Some examples of this are from the very beginning of the book; Margaret Atwood includes descriptive language such as: “On the eastern horizon theres a grayish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in a dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon”. This quote enables the reader to understand that there has been a change in the environment – that the time is past civilisation. The use of diction and imagery work