Reading the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the general idea of the novel is a boy who goes to war and becomes captured by the German soldiers. Seems normal enough, but upon further reading, it is also about the boy getting abducted by aliens and brought back to their planet. He becomes "unstuck in time" and is forced to visit and revisit his past and future events.
This can be related to Oryx and Crake because Snowman feels trapped in his past. He is constantly thinking back to his childhood and adolescence. He becomes consumed in the memories and the thoughts of regret. Many chapters are of Snowman revisiting his past, and I believe they will eventually add up into his present. As of now in the book, I have no idea what happened to Snowman, why he refers to himself as Snowman instead of Jimmy, and what happened to the world.
The major themes of Slaughterhouse-Five are fate, free will, and the illogical nature of human beings.
I think all these themes can be tied into Oryx and Crake. Fate because Snowman, it seems, has given up on any hope he once had. I think he knows his fate is simply death. This could also be foreshadowing though, maybe something drastic will happen to change his fate. In the compounds, it does not seem that young Jimmy had a lot of free will. No one did. They could not leave and had a lot of restrictions on what they could and couldn't do, such as curfews. In the present, Snowman has too much free will because there is no one to tell him what to do.
I think the illogical nature of human beings relates most to Oryx and Crake because it seems like the humans in the novel do not have their priorities straight. These people are living in these compounds where they alter animals to give them things they need, such as organs. The organs can help people immensely, but they also do other experiments such as create new species and create microbes to alter your skin to 'perfection'. In a world where you can't freely travel wherever you want, you would think that they would have bigger priorities. I think that has a lot to do about the novel, how humans easily lose their way and get too caught up in the material things in life. I think it is a message that we need to change our ways as to not end up with a world similar to the one in this novel.
The allusion in Oryx and Crake can definitively relate to the novel. I also predict there to be some sort of extraterrestrial involvement too.
