Oryx And Crake Analysis

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, discuss the modification of the natural world and human nature. The books come from different perspectives but discuss these same ideas. Notes from the Underground comes from the perspective of a man who is somewhat in hiding in a small corner of a room with a servant in an attempt to escape the outside world of Petersburg, Russia. While Oryx and Crake comes from a boy who is also living on the outskirts of society but travels in an effort to escape the tragedy at home. In Notes from the Underground, the narrator claims that the natural world follows its own rules and laws regardless of human desires. He describes this by saying that “Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is and consequently all its results as well” (13). It is not as though nature cares if humans are content with what it is doing, it acts by its own will so much that humans cannot try to control or alter it, they can only adapt. In Oryx and Crake, we are transported into a period of time in which the natural world is already being modified. On page 292, Jimmy and Crake go to lunch at a five-star restaurant which tells us

This pill “eliminates the external causes of death” by protecting the user from all known forms of sexually transmitted diseases, providing an unlimited libido, and extending youth and by serving as a “sure-fire one-time-does-it-all-birth-control pill” for men and woman (294). In sum, it “was designed to take a set of givens, namely the nature of human nature, and steer these givens in a more beneficial direction” (293). The pill would take everything about a human’s nature and change it in a way to benefit society and create a beneficial society or a utopia