Close Reading and Evidence
Close reading begins with attention to a small piece of text and ends with a claim about the whole. Because the novel is in copyright, this packet does not supply the passages. You will choose them from your own edition and use only short quotations in your writing.
Using evidence responsibly. Keep quotations short, accurate and necessary. Do not reproduce long passages, and do not invent quotations or page numbers. Cite the edition you use. If you are unsure of a word, check your copy rather than guessing.
The five steps
- Choose a passage that does work. A passage where a character realises something, a description that mixes beauty with danger, a conversation that reveals power, or a moment of apparent explanation.
- Read it twice. First for what happens; second for how it is told. Mark verbs, repeated words, shifts in time, and anything that is conspicuously absent.
- Name one choice. A choice of narration, imagery, sentence rhythm, dialogue, naming or structure.
- Explain the effect. What does the choice make the reader understand, feel or suspect? How does it shape the reader's relation to Jimmy's memory or Crake's plan?
- Build a claim and test it. State what the passage suggests about the novel as a whole. Check the claim against a second passage. If the second passage contradicts it, revise the claim.
Three levels of evidence
| Level | What you look at | Example question |
|---|---|---|
| Word | A single word, image, name or phrase. | Why this name rather than a neutral one? |
| Scene | How a scene is arranged, who speaks, who is silent, what is shown or withheld. | Whose perspective organises the scene? |
| Structure | Where the passage sits, what it follows, what it delays or reveals. | What would change if this information came earlier or later? |
Structural evidence
You do not always need a quotation. Some of the novel's most important choices are structural: the present-tense opening, the delayed explanation of the pandemic, the alternation between Snowman's journey and Jimmy's memories, and the open ending. You can analyse these choices precisely by describing what the novel does and where it does it. This is often stronger than a quotation that merely illustrates a theme.
Model paragraph (no quotation)
The novel delays the full explanation of the pandemic until the reader has already spent time in its aftermath. By beginning with Snowman's thirst, injury and responsibility for the Crakers, the novel makes the catastrophe a lived condition before it becomes a historical event. When the past-tense sections finally explain Crake's plan, the explanation does not relieve the present. It deepens it, because the reader can now see how ordinary decisions, corporate routines and personal resentments contributed to a world that already feels irreversible.
Model paragraph (with naming evidence)
The name BlyssPluss does satirical work before the reader knows what the product does. The spelling turns "bliss" and "plus" into a trademark, with a synthetic y and a doubled s that make the promise of happiness sound manufactured. When the novel later reveals the pill's hidden cost, the name becomes a small model of the whole world: a cheerful commercial surface covering a system that manages life and death for profit. Atwood's coinage is not decoration. It teaches the reader to distrust the language of improvement.
Evidence log
| Quotation or structural detail | Where it appears | What it does | Claim it supports |
|---|---|---|---|
Common pitfalls
- Describing the world instead of analysing it. A list of inventions is not an argument about what they mean.
- Treating Jimmy as the author. The novel's views are constructed through narration; they are not simply Jimmy's opinions.
- Ignoring structure. A quotation can tell you what a sentence does; structure tells you what the novel does with it.
- Overquoting. Long quotations take up space and weaken analysis. Use the shortest evidence that lets you make your point.
- Inventing detail. If you cannot remember a word or page, check your copy. Do not fill the gap with a plausible-sounding quotation.
Practice
Choose one of the following: the opening, Jimmy's first memory of the compounds, the Extinctathon game, the first description of the Crakers, the BlyssPluss revelation, or the final page. Annotate it for one choice and one absence. Then write a paragraph that begins with a claim about the whole novel, not with a summary of the scene.
This page models method, not fixed interpretations. The novel is in copyright, so no passages are reproduced here.