Although optimism is not found on the surface of Rawi Hage's Cockroach and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, the texts are existential discussions of validity associated with "hope" for humanity. Hage's unnamed narrator, a suicidal immigrant, is a psychoanalytic experiment left wandering in a twisted capitalist world, while Atwood's Snowman/Jimmy is a man experiencing a severe identity crisis in a post-apocalyptic society he is working to design a new race of homo sapiens. . Both protagonists adopt non-human attributes in an attempt to endure consumption-driven commonalities; the nameless immigrant undergoes an ambiguous transformation into a cockroach, and Jimmy is deprived of civilization as the sole survivor of a virus and takes on the role of the "Abominable Snowman". The characters exist in marginal spaces outside the capitalist system managing their worlds as a means to achieve individuality. They are classless, free-flowing signifiers that survive liminally by hiding from capitalism. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a political lens through which characters can be examined to segregate 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayFoucault 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 patterns of consumption that pervade Atwood and Hage's texts. Liminality, however, for the protagonists functions as a space that exists outside of social boundaries and behavioral norms; it is through these spaces that liminals inhabit, that liberation is a possibility. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punishment is a 1975 interrogation of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that have occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age. It is an outline of Foucault's definition of discipline – discipline that concerns the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body – which he believes developed a new economy and politics for bodies. His theory is useful as it is applicable to the capitalist systems that frame both texts and aids in liminal characterization in opposition to these patterns of consumption. Foucault's section on discipline begins with the emergence of the 'new soldier': “…the soldier has become something that can be done; from a shapeless clay, from an inadequate body, the necessary machine can be built; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint slowly runs through every part of the body, mastering it, making it ductile, ready at any moment, silently transforming itself into the automatism of habit…” (Foucault 139) The malleability of the soldier can be applied to that of the consumer, who en masse populate the settings of both novels. Nameless, 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 distinguishable in their conscious opposition to the “docile soldier.” Sometimes the cockroach 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 consciousness of “oppressive power” and his cognition of exclusion from such oppression. The narrator's marginalized existence is to the extent that he lacks both authority over himself and whatshould govern it. His social presence is so minimal that his 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 involved in assimilating one's culture. Hutchison writes: “To “become a good citizen” he must transform himself into one. As a result, the narrator is often caught between maintaining his cultural identity and transforming himself into a dirty cockroach and a thief. In both intermediate states, he lives as an exception to the world outsider Jimmy, or rather, Snowman, participates in a post-apocalyptic society that relies on bioengineering, genetic modification, and corporations as substitutes for a governing system. His liminality is defined by his inability to liberate his life before of the plague and by his resistance to conforming to the post-plague world. He is described as "...existent and non-existent, flickering at the edges of blizzards, ape-like man or man-like ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumors and through his backward-facing footprints." (Atwood 7-8) Snowman is himself a remnant of another historical era, so it is fitting that he has an anachronistic name that has no meaning in the present. The "Abominable" modifier is also appropriate, since Snowman is supposedly the only member of the human species to survive the catastrophe. Even Snowman does not adapt to the "docile bodies" explained by Foucault, he does not understand compatibility with disciplinary spaces. Foucault's concept of power as a product of discipline is based on social systems that thrive on science and numerical thinking. Snowman, however, in contrast to Foucault's theory and Crake's genius, excels in the arts and humanities. Even its liminal existence borders on this binary, that of the struggle between numerical thinking and linguistic cognition (words). Atwood defines Snowman as “kind of a castaway. He could make lists. It could give structure to his life. But even a castaway presupposes a future reader, someone who will come later and find his bones and his log, and learn his fate. Snowman cannot make these assumptions: he will have no future reader, because Crakers cannot read. Whatever the reader can imagine is in the past. (Atwood 41) Snowman's attachment to words and language is unnecessary to the new society, which further exiles him from the norm. It lives on the threshold between the past and the futuristic present, which is amplified by Atwood's similar narrative style, in which the plot proceeds through a composition of memories and a procession of the present. Foucault, in addition to the changing flexibility of modern soldiers, or consumers, describes the importance of the caste system for the function of disciplinary spaces. He explains: “…the rank: the place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect…Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of structures. It identifies bodies through a collocation that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and makes them circulate in a network of relations." (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 changes continuously to meet market standards, causing society to become cyclical in advertising, catering, production and purchasing. however, it is a signifier that does not apply to the protagonists. Hage's narrator participatesinstead to the rank of the underground: “The underground, my friend, is a world unto itself. Other men look to the sky, but I tell you that the only way to cross the world is to pass underground." (Hage 24) The narrator's liminality extends to his 'passage' into the underground, which is a world of its own and functions outside the capitalist norm. Hutchison also comments on deinarrator classification regarding the 'rank' of immigrants in Canada:“In other words, then, the role of the immigrant is constructed as something different from the role constructed for the dominant group. This in itself makes sense, because if Canada's fabricated national unity is based on a “mosaic concept,” then there should still be “other particulars” to the extent that others absorb (and, consequently, assimilate) the deeply rooted assumptions about the immigrant.”(Hutchison 9)Hutchison distinguishes the role of the immigrant as someone outside the dominant cultural group, a comparison of which the narrator himself is aware when he complains about his companions immigrants: he mockingly calls them "aristocrats" but equates them with "colonial servants, gardeners and soldiers sold out for invading empires". (Hage 159) Foucault's ranks can also be applied 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 say: I am here, I exist. There is existence and there is emptiness; you are a one or a zero. I was once 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 dying absolutely without any consciousness of it. It is either perpetual existence or nothingness, my friend.”(Hage 122) The narrator is aware of his 'bottom of the ladder' rank and the liminal enigma of his existence. His liminality now extends to a man who exists on the threshold of life and death, a space similar to that of purgatory; his life begins to take the form of a paradox in which his disgust distances him from consumerism, even though his deepest and most human desire is to belong. Both novels adopt a certain political flavor in government structures, or lack of government forces. Foucault theorizes about political ideologies in disciplinary systems, as he is convinced that power should not be negatively connoted, but rather progressively. The function of discipline in political systems is to individualize populations for 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 clearly encapsulates the definition and mission of In a successful political system, however, Atwood provides a pessimistic counterpoint to ideology: “Anyway, perhaps there were no solutions. 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 made its way through all the other biological forms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out as pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic garbage.( Atwood 243) This passage occurs when Snowman converses with then-girlfriend, Amanda Payne and her progressive-minded friends, a significant period of time before the catastrophe. Jimmy personifies the cyclical nature of human destruction by transforming it into that of a snail, consuming and defecating consumer culture. The Snowman binary is present even when he was just Jimmy, because he is aware of the part,>.