“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
