Oryx and Crake: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

SoYummie. Jimmy and Crake graduate from HelthWyzer High. Crake graduates at the top of the class, and has earned a spot at the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute. Jimmy will be attending the much less important Martha Graham Academy, an arts-oriented school. Ramona (now his stepmother officially) and his father attend the graduation and offer jimmy congratulations, but all Jimmy can think about is what his real mother would have thought. He concludes she wouldn’t have cared about his graduation at all. Jimmy resorts to getting very drunk to alleviate his sorrow.

After the ceremony, Crake approaches Jimmy and brings up the subject of his own mother, who we learn passed away suddenly only a month ago. Crake explains what happened in a remarkably glib manner. His mother had died of a terrible disease, and had been incoherent at the end. Before she died she had “frothed”—Crake compares her to a salted slug. Jimmy assumes it’s just an act, and that Crake is hiding his grief to maintain his coolness.

Happicuppa. After graduation, Jimmy goes on vacation with Crake and Uncle Pete. Instead of watching their usual TV programming, they tune into news about the “coffee wars.” HelthWyzer has created a new bean that could be picked mechanically, and a global resistance movement has broken out against the new “Happicuppa” bean, because it is putting small growers and laborers out of business. Crake tells Jimmy he is against Happicuppa because they are “nuking” cloud forests to plant their new beans, but also maintains he is not on the side of the “peasants” who are revolting.

Sometimes Jimmy and Crake watch the coffee wars coverage with Uncle Pete, who has stock in Happicuppa and says disparaging things about the rebels. While watching this coverage, Jimmy sees his mother on the screen, wearing a green bandana over her mouth and shouting at CorpSeCorps men. He asks Uncle Pete to freeze the frame, but Uncle Pete has already changed the channel. Jimmy thinks he shouldn’t have said anything, and hopes Uncle Pete didn’t notice—he doesn’t want to betray his mother.

When Crake and Jimmy are alone again, they talk about what Jimmy saw. Crake says he guessed it was Jimmy’s mother, and assures Jimmy he can be trusted. Seemingly to make Jimmy feel better, Crake tells him that Crake's own father had also left under similar circumstances, and died after going over a highway overpass. Crake says that everyone talked about it as though it was a suicide, but he doesn’t believe it was. Jimmy asks him if his father had simply fallen by accident. Crake tells him “he was kind of uncoordinated” and smiles.

When Snowman thinks about this event years later, he is furious with himself. He thinks, “How could I have missed it?” and realizes Crake had been trying to tell him something. Jimmy had been willfully ignorant.

Applied Rhetoric. Jimmy and Crake part ways to go to their separate academies. Martha Graham has fallen into a state of disrepair, and the facilities are unimpressive. The school is named after the 20th century dancer, Martha Graham, and puts special emphasis on the humanities and performing arts in particular. As the importance of the arts has waned, Martha Graham has shifted its emphasis. The school now focuses on “contemporary arenas” and more employable skills, like writing advertising copy and pamphlets, or manipulating images, or writing for web-based games.

Jimmy studies “problematics” (which would prepare him for a job writing descriptions of new products.) He lives across the hall from a “fundamentalist” vegan named Bernice whom he finds very unattractive. Bernice antagonizes Jimmy about everything from his faux-leather sandals to his string of overnight female guests, and Jimmy manages to change rooms.

Jimmy realizes at Martha Graham that he is interested in damaged, artistic women, because he finds them easy to manipulate, and finds satisfaction in listening to others’ vulnerabilities. The relationships never last long, because Jimmy gets bored rather quickly. Jimmy often likes to use the story of his mother to draw women in—it works on everyone except Oryx.

Asperger’s U. Jimmy and Crake correspond by email. Crake tells Jimmy that people call Watson-Crick “Asperger’s U” because there so many strange, socially inept geniuses there. Crake says there are absolutely no “neurotypicals” there—in other words, people who lack the genius gene.

Though Jimmy could easily purchase papers instead of writing them, he applies himself at Martha Graham and spends long hours in the library looking for the most obscure, arcane books he can find. He also begins compiling lists of old, unusual words, occasionally tossing them into conversation. For his Applied Rhetoric course, he writes a term paper on self-help books of the 20th century. He enjoys quoting these texts to his friends, who find them hilarious. His senior dissertation is an extension of his self-help term paper—he earns an A.

Crake invites Jimmy to visit Watson-Crick over the holidays and Jimmy accepts. At Watson Crick, Jimmy is stopped by Watson-Crick security, who question him yet again about his mother. When Jimmy tells the guards he has come to see Crake, the guards look impressed and let him through. Jimmy is so pleased to see Crake he almost cries.

Watson-Crick’s campus is modern and beautiful, decked out in high-tech genetically modified plants in a wide array of colors. The climate is carefully controlled and the air is clear and pleasant. Jimmy asks Crake if the large butterflies are “real” and Crake responds by saying that things created by science are as real as things created by nature.

Crake takes Jimmy on a tour of the campus, frequently introducing him to others as “Jimmy, the neurotypical.” Jimmy is especially thrown by a lab that is growing a new kind of chicken, with no head, feathers, or feet. It is just a lump of muscle with a feeding tube. Crake explains that these chickens are so cost-effective that the resulting food product (“Chickienobs”) will be able to undercut the cost of all similar products.

Next Crake shows Jimmy the wolvog pen. It is a CorpSeCorps-funded project that has designed a dog that looks friendly but is irreversibly vicious. The CorpSeCorps is thinking of building moats around protected areas and filling them with wolvogs. Jimmy feels ill—seeing all of this has made him uncomfortable, and he wonders if a line is being crossed. Crake remarks offhand that mankind has always built walls to keep nature and God confined—animals are kept in zoos, and God is kept in churches. He clarifies, however, that he does not believe in God or Nature.

Hypothetical. A few days into his visit Jimmy asks Crake about the dating prospects at Watson-Crick. Crake explains that “pair-bonding” is not encouraged, and that if you really need it, you can arrange to get a prostitute through student services. Crake thinks this service is a good idea, because it allows you to fulfill whatever desires you have without getting distracted from your work.

Crake and Jimmy hang out in much the same way they used to. They play computer games, or make funny sentences out of the fridge-magnet words Crake has on his fridge. Jimmy finds it relaxing to simply sit and listen to Crake talk. One day Crake tells Jimmy that HelthWyzer and similar companies have been producing viruses and releasing them into the population in order to sell the cures—because “illness isn’t productive.” Crake's father, Crake then reveals, was pushed off an overpass because he had found out about this practice. Jimmy is shocked. Crake says that Uncle Pete or his mother must have turned his father in. Then he suggests that Jimmy’s mother must have known, and that’s why she was so disappointed in Jimmy’s father, and ultimately why she ran away.

On the last evening of Jimmy’s visit, Crake asks him to play Extinctathon. Jimmy agrees, and when Crake logs on Jimmy realizes that Crake has become a grandmaster. MaddAddam instructs grandmaster Crake (via a screen pop-up) to “find his playroom.” In order to do so Crake brings up a picture of 8-year-old Oryx, from the screenshot taken years ago, and clicks on her eye. It opens the playroom. Jimmy is jealous and furious, but doesn’t know why he feels so strongly and says nothing.

A string of e-bulletins pops up on the screen. They all describe events where mysterious hostile bioforms attacked the animals and products created by major corporations. Then Maddaddam asks for “new initiatives.” Jimmy gets nervous and asks Crake what’s going on. Crake explains MaddAddam runs a subversive, rebellious operation, and that the MaddAddam group wants to tear the whole corporate system down. Crake says he doesn’t know much about who they are, except that they are doing very advanced work and must have been trained in the compound. Jimmy tells Crake he shouldn’t be messing around with this stuff, as he could be caught, but really the thing on his mind is the picture of Oryx, and why Crake had chosen it for his gateway.

During this visit, Crake often wakes Jimmy up by screaming, horribly, in the middle of the night. When Jimmy asks him about it, Crake responds that he never remembers his dreams. When Snowman thinks about this later, he realizes that, while Crake could never remember his dreams, Snowman worse than remembers them—he’s trapped in Crake’s dreams. He no longer wonders why Crake screamed so much.