‘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,OryxandCrakeoffers a unique perspective on the correlation between the death of apeople and the death of their language: Jimmy/Snowman’s narrativeperspective centres the role of language at the tipping point of society. Thispaper undertakes a close reading of extinction (of humankind and of humanlanguage) in the novel, using this to inform a broader conceptual study ofmeaning-making in social systems and the role of language in memory. Theoscillation throughout the novel between memories of a peopled world andthe post-apocalyptic present day facilitates discussion of how languagefunctions in both individual and social settings, such as fashioning memorythrough acts of naming and renaming, and the experience of share language as a form of intimacy