Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood (2003)
“A satire of corporate science run amok, told by the last human on Earth — a man who loved the genius who destroyed everything.”
Character Analysis
The last humanist in a world that had no use for humanism. Jimmy is the 'word person' — verbally gifted, emotionally needy, intellectually mediocre by Compound standards. His facility with language makes him a natural advertiser and a natural mythmaker, both of which are forms of lying in service of something larger than truth. As Snowman, he becomes the reluctant prophet of a species he didn't create and can barely sustain, keeping the Crakers alive with stories because stories are the only technology he commands. His tragedy is not that Crake chose him but that Crake was right to choose him — Jimmy's sentimentality, his emotional attachment to words and women and lost things, makes him the only person who would care enough to stay.