| LK Englisch 13.2 |
Klausur |
March 1, 2007 |
Note
The following text is an extract from another dystopian
novel by Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). At the beginning of the
novel, we learn indirectly that the protagonist, whose nickname is Snowman,
is a survivor of some kind of catastrophe, and that he lives apart from a
group of Crakers (a new type of human species), who seem quite peaceful,
nature-loving and harmlessly inquisitive about Snowman. Snowman’s friend
from before is Crake, who is in fact the creator of the Crakers, who through
genetic modification have developed features such as thick skin resistant
to ultra-violet sunrays. Oryx was Snowman’s lover, and sometimes appears
to him in daydreams.
Immediately before the present extract, we learn
that Snowman has lost his pocket knife, that he first slept on the ground
but moved to a platform he built himself in a tree to escape animals such
as “rakunks”, “wolvogs” and “pigoons”. During the noontime heat he stretches
out naked on a bed frame to “get some air on all the surfaces of his body”.
Now the sun is at full glare;
the zenith, it used to be called. Snowman lies splayed out on the grillwork
of the bed, in the liquid shade, giving himself up to the heat. Let’s
pretend this is a vacation! A schoolteacher’s voice, this time, perky,
condescending. Ms. Stratton Call-Me-Sally, with the big butt. Let’s pretend
this, let’s pretend that. They spent the first three years of school
getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if
you did the same thing. Let’s pretend I’m here with you, big butt and
all, getting ready to suck your brains right out your dick.
Is there a faint stirring?
He looks down at himself: no action. Sally Stratton vanishes, and just as
well. He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time,
what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him
alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like
money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no
matter what he does with it.
He might whittle, for instance.
Make a chess set, play games with himself. He used to play chess with Crake
but they’d played by computer, not with actual chessmen. Crake won mostly.
There must be another knife somewhere; if he sets his mind to it, goes foraging,
scrapes around in the leftovers, he’d be sure to find one. Now that he’s
thought of it he’s surprised he hasn’t thought of it before.
He lets himself drift back
to those after-school times with Crake. It was harmless enough at first.
They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others. Three-Dimensional Waco,
Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all used parallel strategies: you had
to see where you were headed before you got there, but also where the other
guy was headed. Crake was good at those games because he was a master of
the sideways leap. Jimmy could sometimes win at Kwiktime Osama though, as
long as Crake played the Infidel side.
No hope of whittling that
kind of game, however. It would have to be chess.
Or he could keep a diary.
Set down his impressions. There must be lots of paper lying around, in unburned
interior spaces that are still leak-free, and pens and pencils: he’s seen
them on his scavenging forays, but he’s never bothered taking any. He could
emulate the captains of ships, in olden times – the ship going down in a
storm, the captain in his cabin, doomed but intrepid, filling in the logbook.
There were movies like that. Or castaways on desert islands, keeping their
journals day by tedious day. Lists of supplies, notations on the weather,
small actions performed – the sewing on of a button, the devouring of a clam.
He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life
some structure. But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who’ll
come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman
can make no such assumption: he’ll have no future reader, because the Crakers
can’t read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past.
A caterpillar is letting
itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiralling towards
his chest. It’s a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with
tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of
tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar
just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another
such conjunction.
These things sneak up on
him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a
vitamin deficiency.
The caterpillar pauses,
feeling around in the air with its blunt head. Its huge opaque eyes look
like the front end of a riot-gear helmet. Maybe it’s smelling him, picking
up on his chemical aura. “We are not here to play, to dream, to drift,” he
says to it. “We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.”
Now, what atrophying neural
cistern in his brain did that come from? The Life Skills class, in junior
high. The teacher had been a shambling neo-con reject from the heady days
of the legendary dot.com bubble, back in prehistory. He’d had a stringy ponytail
stuck to the back of his balding head, and a faux-leather jacket; he’d worn
a gold stud in his bumpy, porous old nose, and had pushed self-reliance and
individualism and risk-taking in a hopeless tone, as if even he no longer
believed in them. Once in a while he’d come out with some hoary maxim, served
up with a wry irony that did nothing to reduce the boredom quotient; or else
he’d say, “I coulda been a contender,” then glare meaningfully at the class
as if there was some deeper-than-deep point they were all supposed to get.
(837 words)
(From: Margaret Atwood,
Oryx and Crake, Ch. 3; New York: Anchor Books, 2004; © 2003)
12 whittle
(sth.): (etwas) schnitzen; 17 Waco: reference to a place in Texas
where in 1993 a group of people belonging to a sect whose leader refused
to cooperate with federal authorities were killed by a fire in their compound
after a 53-day siege; 18 Osama: reference to
Osama bin Laden, leader of a global Islamist terrorist organization; 21 infidel (derog): person belonging to
a religion you do not consider the true one; 25 foray: short
journey to do sth. very particular; 37 conjunction:
combination of events that causes a particular result; 41 “We are
not here to play, […] loads to lift”: quotation from a religious
song (“Be Strong”) by Maltie D. Babcock (1858–1901); 43 neural:
concerning nerves; 44 neo-con = neo-conservative: group
of US thinkers who advocate a strong unilateral US foreign policy; reject
(n): sb. who is not accepted by society or a particular group in society;
dot.com bubble: period in the 1990s when it was believed that
shares (= Aktien) in Internet companies were more valuable than they actually
were; 46 push sth.: advertise or teach sth.; 49 “I coulda
been a contender”: quotation from the film On the Waterfront
(1954), meaning “I could have been a powerful person”
1. Describe Snowman’s physical
and mental situation as it comes across in the extract. (comprehension)
2. This is not a straightforward narrative: Analyse the different elements that make up the text, and show how they work together to reveal information about Snowman’s situation. (analysis)
3. Do either of the following:
a) Compare Snowman’s situation with that of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, and comment on the fundamental difference despite some striking similarities. (comment)
b) Both Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale can be classed as dystopias. Explain to what extent the extract shows typical elements of this literary genre, and compare your findings with what you know about The Handmaid’s Tale and other dystopian novels. (evaluation)