Throughout the novel, references to a time passed are often made to suggest a reality before such instant gratifications and such easy accessibility to information was possible. It is this construct of a time before the novel, that enlightens the reader into the post-modern concepts that deal with deconstruction of art, language and history.

“Strange to think of the endless labour, the digging the hammering, the carving, the lifting, the drilling, day by day, year by year, century by century; and now the endless crumbling that must be going on everywhere. Sandcastles in the wind. (Atwood 45)” I believe this line speaks for the entire novel itself, Jimmy/Snowman is born into a world that is slowly decaying and no one, not even his Mother who is aware of the problems of society, do anything to stop the underlying chaos apparent before Crake was created. Everything put into this cannon, is removed and deconstructed and formed into something new (namely the Crake children), which is also a very post-modern concept of recycling or reusing to known to create something “new”.  The ingenious method of contractions used for renaming the cloned creatures, pigoon (pig ballon), raskunk (rat skunk), OrganInc (organs incorporated) and HelthWyzer (health wiser) along with many others, also shows Atwood’s methods for reusing what was once a known reference, like pig or balloon, and combining them to create an unknown without reference (pigoon).

The deconstruction of the format of the book itself also alludes to post-modernist style. The chapter titles appear random, the numbers underlined without straight lines at times group chapters together or separate them. The font is also of unconventional in style, which shows a contrast from traditional structures of the novel’s format, which speaks to the theme of reinvention.

However, there is also a deep fear set in the character of Jimmy/Snowman for the desire to recreate the past. At one point, he quotes many great classic work’s of literature only to find himself at a loss, “There must have been more. There were more. (Atwood 79)” Oryx simply reminds him of all the other great events and works of art in history that have absolutely no permanence in the world of Crake. Snowman is in fear that he is the only one to remember and that he alone is burdened with the knowledge of a time before Crake. This speaks to a greater concept I think, where Atwood is encouraging the reader to question the ideologies of post-modernism and really take into perspective what this Corporate-ruled/Crake-ruled society has in common with our current democracy, how they overlap and what solution is given in order to stop the deconstructions.