Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake

Jimmy witnesses his own mother's profound sense of ethics about compound research. Her stance, however, marginalizes her and ultimately marks her as a subversive. When she self-selects herself out of doing research in order to stay at home with Jimmy, she is of no "use." Finally, because she is openly opinionated about the community's research-that it is morally and ethically bankrupt-she is identified as a deleterious subject and must be destroyed. While Jimmy's father holds out hope for scientific research and its ability to better human life-"[t]hink of the possibilities, for stroke victims" (56)-she claims that he and his associates have "thought up yet another way to rip off a bunch of desperate people" (56). In an argument with him, she reveals the bogus divisions under girding his research that infect his thinking: "You hype your wares and take all their money and then they run out of cash, and it's no more treatments for them [. . .]. Don't you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do? Making life better for people-not just people with money. You used to be so ... you had ideals, then" (56-57).

Although she had possibilities for being a potential site for insurgency, recognizing NooSkins as a "moral cesspool" (56), she fails because she allows her prisoner mentality to overrun her life, nurturing Jimmy's potential for communion with the world merely in fits and starts. Jimmy's mother disappears the same year that Crake arrives. Although her influence to live a more ethical life remains with Jimmy-for example, her voice frequently directs him throughout the story acting as an apex in the conclusion where he hears her say "Don't let me down" (374)-it will be a struggle for him to easily accept her ideals when he will have to negotiate the desires and expectations that Crake has for them both.

His repressed ethical sensibility is revealed to readers through Snowman when he recalls that (as Jimmy) he did recognize the inherently damaging problems of Compound life. In his visit to Watson Crick, Jimmy thinks that "some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed" (106). And he is not speaking of physical boundaries-like going into the Pleeblands. He is talking about technological and ethical ones like the invention of the wolvogs, which will "take your hand off (205). He asks, "Why make a dog like that? . . . . Who'd want one? . . . . What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control [. . .]?" (205). This is not the first time he suspects people of doing something just for the sake of it. For instance, he is convinced that Crake wants to be Grandmaster of the Extinctathon game, "not because it meant anything but just because it was there" (81).

Jimmy leaves Crake's Paradice only to return as Snowman, whose initial goal is not for survival in the marketplace, but for survival in general: to find food. Snowman invokes a sort of animal laborens sensibility: "Unless you eat, you die" (152). As he journeys toward Paradice it is as though he moves backward through history, tending to the reality that consumption for physical and emotional sustenance and survival is potentially separate from production for economic gain. As he ponders all his sudden free time, he mocks the modern appreciation of instrumental work, some grounded in narcissism: "Woodworking, hunting, high finance, war, golf would no longer be options, he joked" (155). Snowman's return, however, seems a metaphorical journey in search for a potentially different type of sustenance, too. He must retell the story of his experience, including the death of Oryx and Crake, before he can imagine a sustenance that can be earned through community building and reciprocity.