Through the sardonic tone of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the gloomy tone of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both literary novels reveal the futile state of their current, post-catastrophic worlds. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy experiences flashbacks that juxtapose the way people used certain materials before the epidemic, and the way that he and the Crakers use these materials after the epidemic. In The Road, the father recounts items that were significant before the apocalypse. The characters in