An Eco-Interpretation Of Atwood's Oryx And Crake And The Year Of The Flood

Hailed as "the Queen of Canadian literature", Margaret Atwood is one of the most prolific, and respected Canadian writers. Published in 2003, her novel Oryx and Crake is a vision of a scientific dystopian speculative fiction narrated by "Snowman", who seems to be the only survivor of the human race after some worldwide ecological cataclysm, The story tells about his desperate struggle for survival and his reflections of the past---ecological disasters resulting from the abuse of science and technology.Published in 2009, Atwood's latest novel The Year of the Flood is a follow-up vision of that same dystopian world of Oryx and Crake. Different from the earlier book, The Year of the Flood takes female perspective to narrate what happened in the past. The two heroines, Ren and Toby, suppose themselves to be the only human survivors after the destructive waterless flood of a man-made epidemic, and tracks back in time over the corrupt and degenerate world that precedes it.Through a careful textual reading of both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, this thesis tries to analyze the ecological crisis and environmental apocalypse reflected in them, and expose Atwood's profound concern over the ecological problems faced by human beings. By depicting in her novels the ecological disaster, the destruction of both the organic and inorganic lives in the natural world, and human alienation in the process of conquering nature, Atwood suggests that environmental problems are a mirror of the problems of human beings:natural disasters caused by the abuse of science and technology, and social and environmental crises brought about by the uncontrolled human greed.