Dystopia: the Ethics of the Real in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

• Main Authors: Hsiang-Yi Liu, 劉香儀
• Other Authors: Emily Shu-Hui Tsai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28151549189114602738

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 100 === This thesis mainly analyzes Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the novel, due to his hatred of excessive human desire, the character Crake eliminates human beings and creates a world without desire. He believes that the world he creates will be an ideal world where the creatures live without suffering. However, after his vision has been realized, the new world turns out to be a dystopia. This thesis applies Lacanian concepts to analyze Crake’s ethics of the Real that generates horrible violence. In the first place, Lacan’s idea, object a, is employed to demonstrate the insatiable nature of human desire. Since Crake wants to eliminate human desire, he has the force to destroy human beings and to accomplish his ideal world that shows the problem of the ethics of the Real. He supposes what he pursues is the Supreme Good; yet, he is actually commanded by obscene superego imperative to pursue his ideal, which, in fact, is the problem of his unconscious jouissance. In the end, Crake’s ideal world inversely becomes a dystopia, for he universalizes his unconscious desire in creating the new world.