Immortality and immunity in Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopias

Mercedes Díaz Dueñas

pp. 255-270

in: Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Julian Jiménez Heffernan (eds), Community in twentieth-century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy calls our attention to the need to "look squarely at our gaping lack. .. to confront ourselves: first, with utter awareness; then, in such a way as to really scrutinise ourselves' ( "Confronted Community" 25). Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopias The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) offer a unique ground to pursue this scrutiny. They portray both the human compulsion to erase finitude and the obsession for immunity, while critically exposing the way in which human communities are constructed. Hence, they deploy deconstructions not only of various genres, such as dystopia and castaway survivor narra- tives (Bouson, "Game Over" 141), but also of the notion of the organic or operative community, as defined by Nancy in The Inoperative Community.

Cited authors

Nancy Jean-Luc

Atwood Margaret