ISP Comparative Essay

        Human morals always proclaim the necessity of hope in the best in order to survive, even in the most dismal of situations. In both novels Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne the main characters deal with despair in very different ways. In both novels, the main protagonists try to have a positive attitude towards mysterious creatures and are involved in a constant struggle to reveal the person who has been stealthily influencing their fate. Jules Verne portrays hope as the only source of survival significantly more than Margaret Atwood.

 Both protagonists strive to have positive attitudes towards strange individuals in order to relinquish their hope of a continued existence.  To begin, in the novel Oryx and Crake, the children of Crake refer to Snowman about anything they find which is unknown to their nature. When the children of Crake brought forth a sac, and removed from it a piano key, a hubcap amongst many others from the sea, “Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There’s no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say, because it’s always the same. “These are things from before””(9 Atwood). Snowman is continuously approached by the only other species of half-humans surviving on the planet for answers because he is the only person whom they trust, but he does not emanate a constructive attitude towards them. He does not accept the Crakers to be liable enough to see the world through human understanding, and thus always remains in despair of improving the living conditions of the Crakers and himself. Furthermore, when Jimmy learns that there are other humans still surviving after he returns from the bubble-dome, he wonders how he should approach them.   The Crakers inform him about a group of possibly three normal human beings, and Snowman immediately starts to believe that “maybe he’ll succeed in presenting the Crakers to them in proper light. On the other hand, these new arrivals could easily see the Children of Crake as freakish, or savage…Images from old history flip though his head…Genghis Khan’s skull pile…the burning corpse-filled churches in Rwanda” (435).   Snowman does not know what to think of these new human beings, and after long having concluded that he was the last human being alive it would be humane enough to only hope in a better future again, giving him a glimmer of hope. However, Snowman then decides to confront them but he lacks in optimism. On the complete contrary, the five castaways in the novel The Mysterious Island have a much more upbeat attitude towards everything they have to confront from the beginning, instilling in them more hope for survival.  

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 First, the group of castaways decides to tame an orangutan that was part of an invasion into their home, in order to make use of him. After a while it was this same orangutan, later given the status of master Joop, who “had taken readily to his new life in Granite House. He often accompanied his masters into the forest, never manifesting any desire to flee… If they needed some fruit to be plucked from the top of a tree, how quickly he scaled it!” (293).   Master Joop thus becomes an essential part of the growing family on Lincoln ...

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