Arts and Humanities Commons^™

'Everything Looks Different Up Close': Perception In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood, Jennifer Leora Nessel Cassidy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the first two books of her MaddAdam series (a projected trilogy), Margaret Atwood explores a series of events from three very different perspectives. A close reading of the two texts suggests that the specific focalizers chosen, and their very different ways of perceiving the world around them, are central issues in the novels. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood establishes the apocalypse as a problem of dystopian vision through the book's deeply flawed focalizer. In The Year of the Flood two alternative visions are offered in order to rehabilitate the perceptual problems of the first text. In the three …