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Oryx And Crake Mental Health

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Haley Kennedy
Professor Hanggi
LAR 101 The Power of Stories
15 October 2017

In the novels Oryx and Crake and Frankenstein, mental health impacts the main characters and their everyday lives. Each character has been through different life changes that influence their state of mind. To more thoroughly comprehend what each character is going through, this paper analyzes the life changes that occur due to each characters’ mental state. In the novel Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, one of the main characters, Jimmy, grew up with a difficult childhood. He was born an only child to his mother and father. His father worked for a company called OrganInc where he was a genographer, looking at the history of behavior patterns in …show more content…

This is obviously a sign of bad mental health, but there were several incidents that led up to this state of mind. An often occurrence were the fights between her and her husband. She didn’t agree with his ethics and motivations to grow human organs such as kidneys, brain tissue, and livers inside pigoons. “The goal of the pigoon project was to grow foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig” (Atwood 22). This was an issue that may have caused Jimmy’s mother to be neglectful towards her son was her depression. Depression is a mental illness that affected her everyday life. She was so exhausted with the fights with her husband and the depression on top of that. This caused her to be uninterested in her son and it is also what caused her to run away with Jimmy’s pet. This shows that mental illness isn’t always caused by something, but rather someone is born with it. People with depression always have it, but it can be triggered to where it affects their everyday lives. Jimmy’s mother’s depression may have been triggered by stress about her husband’s job and constant arguing with her husband. Either way, whether it is ones chemical make-up or something that causes it, mental health really does affect the way people live their lives. Another main character in Oryx and Crake was Crake. Crake’s real name was Glenn, but he and Jimmy would always play a game where a code name was required and

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