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He might whittle, for instance. Make a chess set, play games with himself.

He used to play chess with Crake but theyd played by computer, not with

actual chessmen. Crake won mostly. There must be another knife

somewhere; if he sets his mind to it, goes foraging, scrapes around in the

leftovers, hed be sure to find one. Now that hes thought of it hes surprised

he hasnt thought of it before.

He lets himself drift back to those after-school times with Crake. It was

harmless enough at first. They might play Extinctathon, or one of the others.

Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Kwiktime Osama. They all

used parallel strategies: you had to see where you were headed before you

got there, but also where the other guy was headed. Crake was good at

those games because he was a master of the sideways leap. Jimmy could

sometimes win at Kwiktime Osama though, as long as Crake played the

Infidel side.

No hope of whittling that kind of game, however. It would have to be chess.

Or he could keep a diary. Set down his impressions. There must be lots of

paper lying around, in unburned interior spaces that are still leak-free, and

pens and pencils; hes seen them on his scavenging forays but hes never

bothered taking any. He could emulate the captains of ships, in olden times

the ship going down in a storm, the captain in his cabin, doomed but intrepid,

filling in the logbook. There were movies like that. Or castaways on desert

islands, keeping their journals day by tedious day. Lists of supplies, notations

on the weather, small actions performedthe sewing on of a button, the

devouring of a clam.

He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life

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some structure.

But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone wholl come

along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman

can make no such assumptions: hell have no future reader, because the

Crakers cant read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past.

Guiding Questions:

1. How does this passage encapsulate the components of a novel of the genre, speculative fiction?

2. What role does the tone play in this passage?