Comparing Oryx And Crake, And Lord Of The Flies

The difference between man and animal is a line that is made up exclusively by humans: they are the ones who decide what is animalistic and what is humankind. Humans also create novels and how they depict themselves and animals in them tells plenty about how humans in general feel about the subjects they’re writing about. For example, novels can use an animal as an image of corruption, another as an an image of innocence, and still one more as an image of wisdom all in the same chapter. Animals in dystopian novels in particular typically represent everything bad about society, including corruption and weakness, and although there is a fine line between humans and animals, perceived by humans, one can only question how fine that line truly is.
But what are the similarities and differences between all the animals? In Oryx and Crake, the main animals are hybrids of the animals we know today. The animals are fused together in a lab, taking out the ‘bad’ parts of each one and highlighting the ‘good’ parts to create an all-around better product. Jimmy’s pet when he was younger was a ‘rakunk’ named Killer: part raccoon and part skunk, without the ferocity of the raccoon and the smell of the skunk. Those working in the labs created a harmless pet for young and old alike, but in the same lab they also created wolvogs, creatures that look like playful dogs but will attack like wolves. At first, they were made to be protection, but once the disease spread out, they became the wild animals they were intended to be originally. Because Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are definitely not set in the same time period, they don’t have many similarities to Oryx and Crake and instead have all the differences. In Animal Farm, certain animals such as the pigs were given certain privileges that other animals were not given simply because “since the pigs perform intellectual work indispensable for the survival of Animal Farm, they – and only they, among the animals – are entitled to drink the milk”, (Gottlieb, pg. 149) even though the commandments they’d jointly made stated that all animals were to be treated equally. Eventually, all the commandments crumbled because the pigs continued to put themselves on the top and changed the rules to do so. This arguably may be the only similarity because the animals in Animal Farm and the corporations – and ultimately Crake – in Oryx and Crake; Crake et al. did whatever they could to continue keeping themselves in business, even if that meant creating a disease or two. Still, in Lord of the Flies, there weren’t many animals around, seeing as that’s why they