Resolution in Oryx & Crake. You didn’t leave us hanging.

[Cami]

Margaret~

Would you speak to the ending of Oryx & Crake and my text-dissecting theory? (This is my favorite book of all time.)

Here it is: Oryx & Crake didn’t leave us hanging because Snowman (Jimmy, Jim, Thickney), our performer, finally moved toward authenticity, something he couldn’t even do as a child. You didn’t tell us what physically happened to him, but by not telling us, you showcased the most important resolution: his transition toward emotional authenticity.

Is that true?

What follows are the clues I used to generate this theory. Are they “real” clues? :)

FIRST CHAPTER COMPARED TO LAST CHAPTER:
The first and last chapter read, “Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of the heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep” (3, 228), but unlike the last morning, the novel’s first morning includes “wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades.” The barricades’ absence in the final morning seems to indicate that Snowman is taking down his walls, his protective devices. The descriptions continue: “On the eastern horizon there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender” (3, 228). In the first morning, this glow is followed by dark silhouettes and shreaks of birds, but there’s a significant difference in the final morning: “Strange how that colour still seems tender. He gazes at it with rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away, as if by some large bird of prey. After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is” (228). Snowman is experiencing a fundamental change. The decline of his personal barriers is matched by an increase in beauty and meaning.

CLOTHING DEPICTS MENTAL STATE
Snowman’s deepest desire is to be known. Jimmy wants his mother to break down his walls. He looks for his name—his identity—in his girlfriend’s journals; his dreams are of women beckoning to him, saying “I know you. I see you. I know what you want” (232). In a symbolic act of shedding the artificiality and finding himself, Snowman sheds his clothes, his costume: pants, shirt, and shoes and wears a dirty sheet, one he exchanges for a clean sheet when he confronts reality in Paradice. Finally, at the novel’s conclusion, Snowman steps toward a meaningful human connection by removing all his clothes (except for his authentic-replica baseball cap), and we discover he no longer has something to give the people he approaches. He is naked. He has discarded performing: “He has nothing to trade with them, nor they with him. Nothing except themselves. They could listen to him, they could hear his tale, he could hear theirs” (232). Snowman has never really shared himself before. As he considers doing so, the words, “Don't let me down,” echo in his mind and readers realize any forward movement involving the soul requires embracing humanity and authenticity nakedly, without disguise.
As his lack of clothing indicates, this is the only place in Oryx and Crake where he is truly authentic, connected with himself and his motives.

Hence, RESOLUTION.

Is that what you intended? Or am I beating the text into my own form in a very annoying way? :)

Thanks for any thoughts you're willing to share. I love how this book makes us think!

[Randy]

I apologize here because at the end of O&C I kept having flashbacks to Planet of the Apes where Charleton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty buried in the beach sand. I had a bit of a problem with the ending but loved Snowman's bug bites, broken bottle collection and his lofty God-like persona coupled with the meyhem of his conscience...aburdly beautiful...thank you Margaret Atwood.

[Msmurphybylaw]

Cami wrote:
Here it is: Oryx & Crake didn’t leave us hanging because Snowman (Jimmy, Jim, Thickney), our performer, finally moved toward authenticity, something he couldn’t even do as a child. You didn’t tell us what physically happened to him, but by not telling us, you showcased the most important resolution: his transition toward emotional authenticity."

I read quite a bit of transformation in Snowman on his last trip to the compound for supplies. He could have stayed in paradise for much longer but he was concerned for the Crakers, but at this point he was tenderly calling them children and taking his job seriously. Something that Thickney or Jimmy would wriggle out or.
I found the closet scene and his lack of interest in clothing, particularly shoes, astounding. Could you imaging walking through a war-zone barefoot, after enduring the wound he already had. I thought about it for a long time and at first I chalked it to slow suicide, but then I realized after he shed all of his clothing but his cap (his one connection to humanity) that he was embracing his role as care taker. He shed his double skins.
I'm still trying to grasp Snowman's breakdown in the ending of The Year of the Flood. Maybe it is the infection, or the realization that there are real live humans living and breathing and touching him. He mistakes Ren for Orayx, so I'm not sure what was going on with him. Flood only touched on him through Ren's perspective, so who knows. Ms Atwood?