Page 45 to 100 Thoughts and Information

Perry 1

Isaac Perry

Mrs. Vallier

ENG 4U

Wednesday, Jan 5th/’11

“When Jimmy was ten he'd been given a pet rakunk, by his father” (49). Over about 50 pages after this flash back the story switches to Snowman's memory of when he was a kid. It follows 10 year old Jimmy through the trials of his childhood, all of which have a major impact on his life in one way or another.

At first things begin to look up for Jimmy as he gains a new best friend in the Killer, the rakunk his father gave him. Unfortunately, not too long after it starts to get bad for him. His mother, who had been slowly losing her grip on life, finally tips over the edge. While Jimmy was at school and her husband at work, she set her plan in motion. After leaving a note for Jimmy that vaguely explained her need to do this, she then proceeded to destroy the work related computers and leave the compound with Killer to liberate the animal. This left Jimmy in a very vulnerable state. His mother had just left him and in the process his best friend was taken from him as well. He didn’t know what to think. “Maybe she had loved Jimmy, thinks Snowman. In her own manner. Though he hadn’t believed it at the time. Maybe, on the other hand, she hadn’t loved him. She must have had some sort of positive emotion about him though. Wasn’t there supposed to be a maternal bond?” (61) A few decades and an apocalypse later he still didn’t know what to think of the situation.

“A few months before Jimmy’s mother vanished, Crake appeared” (69). Crake eventually became Jimmy’s best and only true friend. This helped him get through the loss of killer, and comforted him with his mother’s departure. When his mother left, “Crake didn’t say much. He didn’t seem surprised or shocked. All he said was that some people needed to be elsewhere” (70). Regardless of how impassionate and blunt Crake’s words were, Jimmy still appreciated that he had someone to talk about the situation with.  The pair continued to bond and stick together over the rest of their school career.

They would play computer games, look at all types of porn, and watch snuff videos on their computers together. They did other activities that involved going outdoors and more social events, but the times they spent surfing the net in each other’s rooms is what Snowman remembered the most vividly.  Extinctathon was the game that stood out the most from all the gaming experiences. It was “an interactive biofreak masterlore game he’d found” (80) that involved a variety of obscure species that Jimmy had never hear of. Despite not fully understanding the game, he seemed to recall the rules and lingo the most out of all the games they tried. It’s not yet clear why this is important to Jimmy, but the description of it seems to be foreshadowing something. It could just be put in to describe a better time in his life, but so far everything he has been remembering and thinking about has had some relationship to later events in his life.

Watching different types of porn also had an impact on Jimmy’s life. They cruised around different sites that had different gimmicks and styles while smoking a joint and casually commenting on the obscene images they were looking at. One site in particular stood out to Snowman all these years later, HottTotts. “It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren’t visible, their names weren’t used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted” (89). The site stood out because of a single girl he had noticed performing on it. “This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she’d been then. Her name wasn’t Oryx, she didn’t have a name. She was just another little girl on a porno site” (90). After finishing and wiping the whipped cream from her mouth, “she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer – right into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him” (91). Crake then hit pause and printed an image of what they had just witnessed, then handed a copy of the picture to Jimmy. This image would both physically and mentally stay with him for the rest of his life.