Oryx And Crake Personal Response

Crake; from numbers to words
Oryx and Crake is a story that takes place in a not-so-distant dystopian future that Margart Atwood believes we’re heading towards. The world has been taken over by corporations who are driven purely by greed and profit. These corporations have built giant “compounds” where they house their scientists, who are referred to as “numbers people” by Jimmy, the main protagonist of the story. These “numbers people” are using genetic engineering to “improve” humanity. Anything from the pigoons, a half-pig half-human creature created by OrganInc to grow new genetically perfect organs for their clients, to the ChickieNobs, a “large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin.”, which are used
for the purpose of growing chicken parts minus anything that makes it an actual chicken (no beak, eyes, feathers etc.). This is where our main antagonist, Crake, comes in. While some may say he’s definitely an evil character who just wanted to destroy humanity, it could be argued that crake in fact was motivated by a twisted belief that he was in fact saving humanity from itself.
Though it’s never actually said outright, Crake is considered “numbers person”, as opposed to a “words person” like Jimmy. The implication of being a numbers person is that you’re much better at logical thinking than a “word person”. A “words” person is more likely to be artistic and emotionally driven than a numbers person.
The biggest hint early on that Crake is a numbers person is when Jimmy and Crake see one of their teachers going into a club with a man who had his arm around her waist and Jimmy asks him “You think he’s got his hand on her ass?” (Atwood 85). Crake proceeds to give a detailed step-by-step geometric and statistical breakdown of what the possibility was that the man had his hand on their teachers behind. This gives us insight into how Crake’s mind works. Jimmy thought Crake was joking around as evidenced by him thinking, “He was doing a pretty good imitation of their Chemlab teacher – the use-your-neurons line, and the clipped, stiff delivery, sort of like a bark. More than pretty good, good.” (Atwood 86), but the reality of it is that Crake truly sees everything in the world as geometry and statistics. It’s this world view that leads to him developing the belief that humanity in general is a burden on the earth.
Crake sees humanity as unsustainable. He believes that between overpopulation, pollution, and the destruction of the ozone layer, humanity is going to go extinct regardless of if he acts or not. Looking back after reading the novel, it seems pretty obvious that Crake has been fantasizing about destroying humanity and replacing it with his version, the Crakers, ever since he was young. The earliest sign that Crake wanted to destroy humanity using a bio-agent is when we examine the deaths of his mother and his father-in-law, whom he referred to as Uncle Pete. Crake reveals that his father didn’t commit suicide by jumping off an overpass like everyone was told; his father was in fact murdered by the corporation her worked for in order to keep him quiet about their practice of creating a virus and a cure simultaneously so that they could make money by infecting the pleeblands with the virus, and then selling them the cure. Crake believes his mother was the one that turned in his father when his father was going to try and reveal the truth. After the death of Crake’s father, his mother was killed by a mysterious virus that she was infected with while working at the hospital. Uncle Pete was the next victim, and also died by a mysterious virus.
There’s a sense of poetic justice on Crake’s part here; he chose to eliminate those that he viewed as responsible for his father’s demise by the same method that the corporation he was working for made their money. They killed his father to protect that secret, so he used the same method to eliminate his mother and Uncle Pete. Jimmy believes that both Crake’s mother and Uncle Pete were the first live test subjects for Crake’s plague. Their deaths happened many years before the BlyssPluss pill was created, showing how long Crake had been working on his scheme to end humanity and replace it with the Crakers.
It's not until Crake tracks down Oryx that we learn Crake does have some kind of emotional side.
Both Jimmy and Crake had feelings for Oryx ever since they saw her on T.V. when they were young. Crake felt strongly enough about her to track her down, or at least somebody that fit her description, and try to have a relationship with her. Crake loves her in his own way, but it lacks any kind of emotion. It seems like Crake was aware of the relationship between Jimmy and Oryx. When the world was falling into chaos due to the BlyssPluss pill, Crake killed Oryx in front of Jimmy knowing full well that Jimmy loved Oryx. He did this because he knew Jimmy would end up killing him over it, due to his emotional nature. I believe these final moments reveal that Crake came to the realization that the world needs more than just numbers people; it needs words people as well. He was filled with remorse over what he had done, and knew that because Jimmy was a words person, he was better fit to guide the Crakers in the post-chaos world. His actions at the end seem to show that as a person, he changed. His world view was shattered by the revelation that art and culture is a key part of humanity, and it’s not something that he can program away in the
Crakers.