Tag: literary analysis

Who Tells Your Story?

(This post can be considered a follow-up to my previous post about the narrative structure of Oryx & Crake, expanded to include such structures in The Year of the Flood and the first 200 pages or so of MaddAddam.)

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy can easily be interpreted as a reflection on the practice of storytelling itself, conveying both its own dystopian plot threads and ruminations about the process of writing. Why do we tell stories? How do we tell them? And, perhaps most importantly, who gets to tell them, and how does that affect the story itself?

Oryx & Crake is narrated solely by Snowman (or Snowman-the-Jimmy, if you prefer), varying only in its temporal spaces. In the past and in the present alike, we linger with Snowman and his third-person perspective, relying on him to convey the events he witnessed, limited by the knowledge he has. But subsequent books in the trilogy reveal that, at least for the end of Oryx & Crake, Snowman is feverish and delusional, a fact more obscured in his narration, because naturally it is. Delusion tends to conceal itself from those suffering from it. The Year of the Flood moves more dynamically, both in terms of perspective and in its shifting, overlapping timelines. Ren’s first-person perspective as well as Toby’s third-person perspective shifts from the years before the Waterless Flood to the years after, marked only by the calendar of the God’s Gardeners. The Year of the Flood has a third, distinct narrative perspective in it as well – the sermons of Adam One and the Gardener hymns, which serve as an uninterrupted timeline, only ever going forward, building to the fateful twenty-fifth, eponymous year. MaddAddam’s narrative breaks down into further splinters even though, thus far, only Toby narrates. But Toby’s third-person narration is interrupted by sections of dialogue and sections of Toby hearing a story herself, with the novel taking on another layer to become a story telling the story of someone else telling a story.

The Crakers have always been fascinated by the creation myths imparted to them from Snowman. Snowman himself only began telling stories out of desperation; there was simply no other way to communicate with the Crakers, who couldn’t understand the apocalyptic scenes they encountered outside of the Paradice dome. But Snowman admits he built Crake into a deity out of spite for his dead friend, realizing too late that doing so would only create more questions to be answered. Snowman unwittingly created the rituals of religion amidst the Crakers, who, despite being programmed against recognizing it as religion, regardless adopt it as such. Everything the Crakers cannot understand must become a story, and we see how quickly this lens for the world becomes warped, especially in MaddAddam.

The novel opens with “The Story So Far,” a prologue told in an omnipotent third person without a clear narrator; the prologue’s narrator knows too much about the various twists and turns of the prior two books to be any of the named characters. This is a familiar way to tell a story uncolored by a narrator’s bias – but in a story about stories, we must consider who is supposed to be conveying this summary to us. It is unusual for the third book of a trilogy to deliver exposition in such a direct way, reminiscent of a television episode beginning with a “previously on…” montage. Can we trust this prologue, particularly the facts it designates as more important than others? Can we trust this interpretation of the text if it differs from our own?

MaddAddam proceeds with dialogue alone – no quotation marks, no dialogue tags indicating who is speaking, no context, and no interruption, even as the speaker addresses others. We learn that Toby has taken Snowman’s place as prophet, telling the Crakers their memorized myths for the same reason Snowman did: desperation, and lack of options. What else could she have done? The novel makes it clear that myths are the only way to communicate with the Crakers. Subsequent sections are dedicated to stories about Zeb, and later about Adam One, told first by Toby in myth structure, and then by Zeb in a manner more easily accepted as the “truth.” But even that truth is colored by Zeb’s narration and his own bias, and, as we move along in the text, Toby’s opinions of the stories. It’s almost like watching a story being translated into different languages: varying inflections, varying structures, varying truths. What, MaddAddam questions, is the truth, really? Is the truth only what we want to hear? Is the truth limited by our capacity to understand it? Is the truth only circumstance?

What the MaddAddam trilogy stresses above all else is that stories are necessary to survive. However we may tell them and whatever we may tell them about, we will always tell the stories of ourselves and those around us; of those we have loved and lost, or hated and left behind; of the familiar and the safe; and of what we can never understand.

-Maggie Wrobleski

The Imperfect Narrator

“The Crake they’re praising is his fabrication.” – Oryx & Crake, part 5, “Fish”

Despite being told in a third-person perspective, Oryx & Crake nonetheless takes on Snowman as its narrator. He is the one who imparts the story across its intersecting timelines: from his childhood, when his name was Jimmy and Crake was merely his classmate and best friend; then ahead into the post-apocalyptic future, a world destroyed by Crake himself; and, in more limited bursts, Snowman’s relationship with Oryx, almost in a world and timeframe of their own, floating adrift from the main events of the story. Snowman’s role as a storyteller is not limited to the novel’s narrative, however. He is a prophet among the Crakers, the only one who can communicate with their revered deities Oryx and Crake, the only one who has seen them and can tell their stories. The quote above describes how Snowman’s storytelling has distorted the truth in-universe – despite his own muddled opinion of Crake, he allows for the man’s deification. He claims it’s out of defiance, but what matters is the end result. Crake died to ascend to godhood in the ruins of the world.

This begs the question: can we, the readers, trust Snowman’s narrative? Can we take him at his word? Is he a reliable narrator as a literary device, despite the fact that he’s demonstrated himself to be an unreliable narrator within the context of the story?

For my part, I didn’t find any reason to distrust Snowman’s version of events while reading the novel. Only upon reconsideration did I wonder about the relative truth of the text, and even now, I’m reluctant to label Snowman as unreliable. For one, if we can’t trust Snowman, Oryx & Crake is left without a narrator. But more importantly, the novel and its narration present Snowman to us as trustworthy. His narration lacks ornate prose and wordy descriptions; the novel’s opening lines are plain and to-the-point. Snowman carries a distinct sense of self-depreciation that removes the fear of embellishment; he looks down upon himself and seems aware of his own failings and willing to admit them. Furthermore, he is by leaps and bounds the most empathetic character in the text, aside from perhaps Oryx, in her all-too-brief moments present in the text. But even when counting Oryx, Snowman easily matches her in empathy, and lacks any amount of complicity in Crake’s eventual destructive plans, a distinction that sets him apart from Oryx – even if we never know just how much Oryx knew about the impending end of the world.

That lack of knowledge and clear absence of omnipotence is one of the strongest reasons I trust Snowman as a narrator. There is so much he does not know, so much left ambiguous. Snowman never fully understands Crake’s motivations or Oryx’s psyche, and that fact is painfully reflected in the narrative. Both characters feel distant from Snowman and the reader alike, and Snowman readily admits there is much he doesn’t understand. It feels genuine, the lack of answers the text offers when its timelines finally converge. We the readers are left overwhelmed by the end of the world, just the same as everyone else. Oryx remains a specter, like how Snowman imagines her, only bits and pieces of her story known. Crake remains a reclusive mad genius, behaving in ways that only make sense to the man himself. And Snowman, from the first page to the last, is the only man who can piece together their intertwined stories: imperfectly, but as best as he can.

-Maggie Wrobleski