‘What is toast?’ Language and society in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

With its depiction of a ‘word man’ as the sole survivor of the human race, Oryx and Crake offers a unique perspective on the correlation between the death of a people and the death of their language: Jimmy/Snowman’s narrative perspective centres the role of language at the tipping point of society. This paper undertakes a close reading of extinction (of humankind and of human language) in the novel, using this to inform a broader conceptual study of meaning-making in social systems and the role of language in memory. The oscillation throughout the novel between memories of a peopled world and the post-apocalyptic present day facilitates discussion of how language functions in both individual and social settings, such as fashioning memory through acts of naming and renaming, and the experience of shared language as a form of intimacy.