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The protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s 2003 dystopian novel Oryx and Crake calls himself “Snowman” after the Abominable Snowman. An isolated survivor of the destruction of humanity, Snowman is Atwood’s vehicle to speculate on the future of humanity given the current debates about potential catastrophes: environmental degradation, unchecked scientific progress, rampant consumerism, human exploitation. Contextualised within Atwood’s longstanding interest in survival as a Canadian master narrative and within the divided critical debate about the potential hope of the novel, this paper will read Snowman as a site of negotiation between several contradictions arising from European colonial history and the history of late modernity. Representatively, Snowman invokes the purity of whiteness and the optimism of science and progress of European Enlightenment, yet he simultaneously suffers bodily failure as he …