Oryx And Crake And The Road: A Comparative Analysis

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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 both novels begin to realize that the things that were once deemed as important have become insignificant after the disaster. Due to the hopeless state of their societies, their original intents lack support, and the characters begin to question…show more content…
In Oryx and Crake, the passage is part of the flashback before humanity went extinct. Jimmy is telling the story of when he got involved with Amanda Payne, and his experience in the Modules. The structure of the passage is chronological order, and is limited to what Jimmy wants to include in his description. Jimmy gets to the Modules and immediately feels isolated by the other artists. He is simply just tolerated by the artists because they have no particular interest in anything Jimmy has to say. At the end of the passage, Atwood describes the future of the world in a gruesome manner, which contributes to the satirical tone felt toward society. This mocking tone combined with the chronological nature is seen throughout the whole novel. In the passage in The Road, a lengthy paragraph filled with sentences of differing lengths focuses on the chronological progression of what the father and son endure throughout their journey. This paragraph focuses on the grim environment that surrounds the man and the boy, and the gloominess maintains the hopeless tone felt throughout the novel. Instead of splitting up this description into two paragraphs, McCarthy restricts it to one paragraph in order to illustrate the journey that feels never-ending. The second paragraph maintains the chronological order to contribute to the stream of consciousness from the man as he describes their hopeless trek. The Road is chronological in its entirety, and this passage helps to reveal the design of the novel. The organizational structures of both Oryx and Crake and The Road help to construct the pointlessness of their post-traumatic

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