Struggles In Oryx And Crake

Success of the Elite and Struggles of the Poor
Society divides people into classifications of high, middle and lower class. Who is society to say that one group of people is more important than another? Society judges people and perhaps because of simple things like their career, they are classified lower than others. Social classification has and will continue to be a compelling issue within society, now and in the coming future. Margret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is a dystopian novel set in a futuristic world where a disease has killed off humans. Atwood has continually distinguished that being number smart over word smart immediately makes you higher class and thus successful. Atwood is able to expose the way that the upper class chooses to ignore the affairs the lower class has to face. As portrayed though Oryx, it is seen that if one is
Jimmy, although he is word smart, both his mother and father are number smart which landed him a place in the compounds. Oryx on the other hand grew up very poor and was sold at a young age. People where she lived sold their children to make some money to be able to survive. As Oryx is telling Jimmy about her childhood, he is getting angry because he does not like the way she was treated and he does not believe that she should have been sold. Oryx was trying to ignore Jimmy when he kept asking for her to go on with the story and about when she was sold when she finally replied saying “‘You don’t understand,’… ‘Many people did it. It was the custom.’” (Atwood). The fact that Oryx was saying that selling children was a normal thing to do in her town infers that no one cared what was happening. No one in the lower class cared because they could not have done anything anyways because of their own standings, most likely they would be in the same situation. On the other side, no one in the upper class was there trying to help any of those families. While poor families resulted