Snowman and the Crakers

I wanted to talk a little about this picture and how it explains many things that happen in Oryx and Crake. I really really really enjoyed this novel and I can't find myself not thinking about it so I wanted to respond to this picture. As you can see this is either a drawn or painted image. The first thing that you may notice is probably the man sitting next to a bunch of naked children. The man is clearly Snowman and you know it's him because of many reasons: first he is surrounded by the naked children which are the Crakers, he has a long beard and head hair meaning he hasn't shaved in a while, he is the only visible human, and there is a society drowning around him. So I think it's safe to say that that's Snowman. And you know that these children are Crakers because they are all naked, they are all different skin colors, they all looked engaged in what Snowman is about to do/say, and they are sticking together around Snowman. I feel as if just this picture says a lot about Oryx and Crake. It shows buildings drowned out by the ocean representing the post-apocalyptic world Snowman lives in. It shows Snowman's loneliness as he sits under a tree, the only left of his kind, looking over the world he once saw as normal, now destroyed. It shows the Crakers and how they have so much interest in Snowman because he is so different from them all. This basically represents part of the beginning of the novel whenever Snowman has the Crakers all around him and they keep bothering him and asking him questions of what it was like before and how they were created. It shows a man with nobody like himself to go to, trapped in this world alone.

Ian Ransonet