ABSTRACT
This chapter argues apocalyptic core of Atwood's novel is ambiguously bound to the disjunctions between the real and the system used by humans to "reproduce" it: language. The dual chronological setting of the narrative, entirely focalized through the eyes and consciousness of Jimmy/Snowman, allows the reader to gain an insight into the current postapocalyptic world Snowman - apparently the last human left on earth -shares with a new race of genetically manufactured beings, the "Crakers", and the early twenty-first-century North-American society Jimmy was raised in. The boundaries between pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds remain, however, permeable, as the signs of the world to come are indeed visible in Jimmy's world: living in the corporate scientific compound where his parents work in the field of genetic manipulation. This dualism pointing to the symbiosis of the two kinds of knowledge and ultimately casting a sinister light on the role played by the symbolic order in relation to the apocalyptic predicament.
