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

Oryx, shaped by her boss Crake, acts as one of his major strategies in his altering-the-world game. The overall economics of Atwood's novel point to game and game theory as integral to deciphering a deeper understanding of plot. While used to maximize Crake's profit with respect to pill distribution, Oryx is even more readily used as a strategy to get Jimmy to act as Crake's pawn. Having spent much of his teenage years with Jimmy "watch [ing] porn shows" (85), Crake knows what Jimmy likes in a woman. And he was the first witness to Jimmy's growing obsession with Oryx. On the day that both boys see Oryx for the first time, Crake creates a "small archive" of her photo, giving Jimmy a copy of her to save (91). Morton D. Davis, in his work on game theory, calls attention to the critical role of strategy, claiming that it "is a complete plan of action that describes what a player will do under all possible circumstances" and that "[t]here are poor strategies, just as there are good strategies" (7). In inventing Oryx as an integral aspect of his game implemented to play on Jimmy's obsession, Crake's strategy to win Jimmy over seems a very good strategy indeed.

Yet Davis also illustrates how decision makers do not stand alone or untouched in their game playing or, thus, in their agency. He writes,

A player involved in a game with other decision-making players is in the same position as the scientist who wanted to study a monkey's behavior. After he placed the monkey in a room and gave it time to get acclimated, he looked through the observation slot-and saw the monkey's eyeball looking back at him". (6)

And so Jimmy becomes the monkey looking back at Crake, having the potential to turn Crake's game plan upside down. For instance, as Snowman he raises Oryx to mythological status when he tells stories about her to the Crakers. In that storytelling he turns away from an understanding of Oryx as human instrument to serve personal needs and constructs a vision of her that sees her as an instrument to be used to sustain community and love. She is reinvented as a goddess whose genuine concern for nature requires that its people give attention to regenerative possibilities, like returning the bones of the fish to the waters that have provided the food. This interpretation of Oryx's desires for the Crakers ignores not only her human experience but that experience as it was grounded in capitalist exchange. This revision-from Oryx as an instrument for self validation to Oryx as instrument to maintain others' well being-is a subtle yet important way that Snowman implements his own strategy to rethink instrumentalism, how in and of itself it may not be negative and how it may be re-imagined.

Of course, readers approach this revision of Oryx (told to the Crakers) only in the context of Snowman's othersiory of her. When it is paired with the "absent" text, Snowman's struggle to make critical choices about how to act in life is highlighted. One choice that Jimmy makes is that Oryx must die, especially as she is a hinge in Crake's attempt to re-enter Paradice. Crake uses Oryx as the means for attempting to get Jimmy to open the sealed doors that lead into the heart of the dome. In a sense, Jimmy's future mythologizing of Oryx is dependent upon his killing of her. He cannot allow her-or Crake-to re-enter Paradice in their known human existence, for both have "sinned" against the potential goodness of humanity. So he shuts the doors on them both and stands alone in Paradice.