How to Save the World

The world is shrouded in gray

Wrinkled, scratched, withering.

The once sparkling sky is

A dirty, ever-thickening rag

That clogs and chokes

The vibrant green lungs,

Bleeding, dying and shrinking.

A group of heroes with brave words came.

Promising a cure, a solution, a future.

Those still hopeful watched, believed,

And joined the march.

On and on the saviors went,

Chanting, enchanting.

They saved, and they healed

Sickly saplings and stranded snakes,

Feeble foxes and bedridden bunnies,

Diseased donkeys and coughing cats

An entire forest, miles across.

We must celebrate, said one hero

We shall show the world, said another

Let’s have a feast, said the others,

We will have a bonfire!

What are we burning? Some questioned

Why have a fire? Some asked

Go fetch the wood, the others demanded.

So they had a feast, with a fire

Built using the trees of the forest.

And the fire continues to burn.

The Beast: A Found Poem from Lord of the Flies

(taken from Page 36, 88, 103, 123, 138, and 146)

It's a snake thing that comes in the dark.

It's creepers that want to eat.

It's a nightmare that hangs in the branches.

It's a squid that eats whales whole.

The beast comes out of the sea,

From the vast stretches of water,

To the high sea beyond,

In the unknown indigo of infinite possibility.

It's a beast with claws that scratched,

Sitting on the top of a diminishing mountain,

Behind the silver of the moon.

A giant ape with its head between its knees, 

It lifted its ruin of a face as the wind roared in the forest.

It's a figure tangled by a parachute, 

A poor body that should be rotting away.

It's a pig's head on a stick, the Lord of the Flies.

It's not something you could hunt and kill.

It's part of you.

And it will come back tonight.

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.