“Tell my story”: Remembrance and revenge in atwood's oryx and crake and shakespeare's hamlet

The many literary traditions Margaret Atwood explores and subverts in Oryx and Crake tend to obscure the crucial genre form with which her novel engages: the revenge tragedy. This article proposes that Oryx and Crake be read as an intertextual dialogue with Shakespeare's Hamlet in particular. In both texts, a revenge plot inexorably unfolds: a father is treacherously murdered; a mother, implicated in her husband's death, marries the murderer; an only son learns of the secret crime and dedicates himself to vengeance.