I’m going to return to our many discussions about choices in narrator/narrative to open up a general discussion about what Atwood’s ending means. The narrator in “MaddAddam,” particularly towards the end of the novel, is constantly shifting and being handed off and picked up. We go from Zeb telling his story to Toby to Toby telling it to the Crakers to Blackbeard telling it to the Crakers. In a story which ultimately ends in mating between Crakers and humans and the recreation of “civilization” post apocalypse, this narrative style mimics the way in which one generation leads to the next and one society gives way to the next as mapped out in the novel. In fact, many aspects of the story itself are come full circle in this way, such as how the Crakers and humans return to “Egg” they were created in for a final battle which decides how they will continue existing in this world.
By the end of the novel, we see the Crakers and humans rebuilding many of the fundamental aspects of our society. They are using religion, commemorative rites, and other cultural symbols. They are using language and writing to record. They even practice law in the form of the trial. What does Atwood mean by all of this? Why is the choice to reinhabit the earth, and with so many of the same cultural practices and institutions? Is this cycle of destruction and restoration hopeless? I am hesitant to say it is human nature to turn to these ways of living and meaning making and to center our lives around institutions like gender and religion. But, I am confused as to why Atwood would present all of the problems and violence that comes from a society which has taken it too far just to create a society that looks like it might head down the same path. Even as Blackbeard is recording written history, he is choosing the narratives that are the happiest and the most hopeful, which is not particularly useful for learning from the past which is so often painful, as Toby makes clear (“Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably,” 451.) I’m curious as to how others made sense of the end of the trilogy!
