Although optimism does not reside on the surface of Rawi Hage's Cockroach and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, the texts are existential discussions about the validity associated with “hope” for humanity.” Hage's anonymous narrator, a suicidal immigrant, is a psychoanalytic experiment left to wander a convoluted capitalist world, while Atwood's Snowman/Jimmy is a man going through a serious identity crisis in a post-apocalyptic society who strives to create a new race of homo sapiens. . Both protagonists adopt non-human attributes in an attempt to support consumer-related commonalities; the anonymous immigrant undergoes an ambiguous transformation into a cockroach, and Jimmy is stripped of his civility as the sole survivor of a virus and assumes the role of "the Abominable Snowman." The characters exist in marginal spaces outside of the capitalist system and exploit their worlds as a means to achieve individuality. They are classless, fluid signifiers that survive in a liminal way by hiding from capitalism. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a political lens through which characters can be examined to separate and distinguish their liminal statuses as a mechanism to escape corporate culture and human immorality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Foucault simultaneously constructs and deconstructs a system of power through discipline that focuses on physical bodies and individuality. Foucault's theory of disciplinary spaces resonates with the political systems and consumption patterns that permeate Atwood's and Hage's texts. However, for the protagonists, liminality functions as a space that exists outside of societal boundaries and behavioral norms; it is through these spaces that the liminals inhabit, that liberation is a possibility. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a 1975 interrogation of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that have occurred in Western penal systems in the modern era. This is a profile of Foucault's definition of discipline – a discipline concerned with the smallest, most precise aspects of a person's body – which he said developed a new economy and a new politics of the body. His theory is useful in that it is applicable to capitalist systems that both frame texts and aid in liminal characterization in opposition to these consumption patterns. Foucault’s section on discipline begins with the emergence of the “new soldier”: “…the soldier has become something that can be manufactured; From shapeless clay, from an unfit body, the required machine can be built; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint slowly runs through each part of the body, mastering it, making it flexible, ready at any moment, silently transforming into the automatism of habit…” (Foucault 139) The malleability of the soldier can be applied to that of the consumer. , which en masse populate the settings of the two novels. Anonymous, banal and “docile”, the bodies of populations exist only to maintain plurality and preserve profits. However, the narrator's liminal characterizations of Jimmy and Hage are discernible in their conscious opposition to the "docile soldier." The cockroach sometimes states: “…for me it was all about challenging the oppressive power of the world that I can neither participate in nor control. » (Hage 5) His resistance includes his awareness of "oppressive power" andhis knowledge of the exclusion of this oppression. The narrator's marginalized existence is such that he lacks both authority over himself and that which is supposed to govern him. His social presence is so minimal that his own name is never revealed throughout his psychological adventure. In Jesse Hutchison's essay Immigration and Liminality in Rawi Hage's Cockroach, liminality is discussed in relation to "the 'immigrant' and the difficulties of assimilating one's culture." Hutchison writes: “To “become a good citizen” he must transform himself into a good citizen. As a result, the narrator often hesitates between maintaining his cultural identity and transforming himself in order to survive. dirty and thief cockroach. In the two intermediate states, he lives as an exception in relation to the outside world. Jimmy, or rather Snowman, participates in a post-apocalyptic society that relies on bioengineering, genetic modification, and corporations to replace a system of government. His liminality is defined by his inability to liberate his pre-plague life and his resistance to conform to the post-plague world. He is described as "...existent and non-existent, flickering on the edges of blizzards, man- or ape-like, furtive, elusive, known only by rumor and by his backward-pointing footprints." (Atwood 7-8) Snowman is himself a relic of another era in history, so it is appropriate that he has an anachronistic name that makes no sense in the present. The modifier "Abominable" is also appropriate, since Snowman is presumably the only member of the human species to survive a catastrophe. Snowman does not correspond to the “docile bodies” explained by Foucault either, it does not include compatibility with disciplinary spaces. Foucault's concept of power as a product of discipline relies on social systems that thrive on science and digital thinking. However, Snowman, unlike Foucault's theory and Crake's genius, excels in the arts and humanities. Its liminal existence also borders on this binary, that of the struggle between digital thinking and lingual cognition (speech). Atwood describes Snowman as “kind of a castaway.” He could make lists. It could give some structure to his life. But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who will come later, find his bones and his register, and learn his fate. Snowman cannot make such assumptions: he will no longer have a future reader, because the Crakers cannot read. Any drive he can imagine is a thing of the past. (Atwood 41) Snowman's attachment to words and language is unnecessary for the new society, further exiling him from the norm. It lives on the border between the past and the futuristic present, amplified by Atwood's similar narrative style, in which the plot progresses through a composition of memories and present processions. Foucault, in addition to the changing flexibility of modern soldiers, or consumers, describes the importance of the caste system for the functioning of disciplinary spaces. He explains: “…rank: the place we occupy in a classification, the point of intersection of a line and a column… Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for transforming arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location which does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and makes them circulate in a network of relationships. » (Foucault 150-51) Foucault's definition of rank is consistent with capitalism, since values ​​are shared: consumers are classified under wealth and economic participation. The individual consumer body is constantly evolving in order to meet market standards, whichmakes the company become cyclical in advertising, catering, manufacturing and purchasing. Rank, however, is a signifier that does not apply to the protagonists. Hage's narrator rather participates in the ranks of the underground: “The underground, my friend, is a world apart. Other humans look at the sky, but I tell you, the only way to get through the world is through the underground. » (Hage 24) The narrator's liminality extends to his “passage” in the basement, which is a world in its own right. clean and operates outside the capitalist norm. Hutchison also comments on the narrator's classification of the "rank" of immigrants in Canada: "In other words, the role of the immigrant is constructed as something other than the role that is constructed for the dominant group. This in itself makes sense, because if Canada's manufactured national unity is based on a "mosaic concept", then there should always be "particular others" to the extent that others absorb (and, therefore, assimilate). ) deeply ingrained assumptions about the immigrant. » (Hutchison 9)Hutchison distinguishes the role of the immigrant as that of a role outside the dominant cultural group. This indicates a classification by comparison, a comparison of which the narrator himself is aware when he complains about his fellow immigrants: he mockingly calls them "aristocrats" but equates them with "colonial servants, gardeners and sold soldiers to invade empires. (Hage 159) Foucault's ranks can also apply to the “emptiness” that the narrator describes in relation to fundamental existence: “I am at the bottom of the ladder. But I still exist. I look society in the face and I say: I am here, I exist. There is existence and there is emptiness; you are either a one or a zero. Once I was curious about emptiness. If I had died on that tree branch in the park, I would have experienced the other option... Emptiness cannot be experienced. Emptiness should mean absolutely perishing without being aware of it. It's either perpetual existence or nothingness, my friend. » (Hage 122) The narrator is aware of his rank “at the bottom of the ladder” and the liminal enigma of his existence. His liminality now extends to a man who exists on the threshold of life and death, a purgatory-like space; his life begins to take the form of a paradox in which his disgust drives him away from consumerism, even though his deepest, most human desire is to belong. Both novels take on a certain political flavor in the structures of government, or lack of governing forces. Foucault theorizes about political ideologies in disciplinary systems because his belief is that power should not be negatively connoted, but rather progressively. The function of discipline in political systems is to individualize populations with a view to bodily control. Foucault describes: “politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army, or of the disciplined mass, of the docile and useful troop…” (Foucault 173). Foucault carefully presents the definition and mission of However, a successful political system, Atwood offers a pessimistic juxtaposition to ideology: “Maybe there were no solutions anyway. Human society, corpses and rubble. He never learned, he made the same stupid mistakes over and over again, trading short term gains for long term pain. It was like a giant slug that relentlessly worked its way through every other biological form on the planet, crushing life on earth and throwing it back out as pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be obsolete plastic waste. Atwood 243) This passage occurs,>.