Defusing the Bomb: Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation and the Death of the Nuclear Family

Abstract

In Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation, complex, nontraditional familial structures are depicted and explored in conjunction with the human impact on the natural world. The paper examines Ozeki’s novel through an ecocritical, anti-capitalist lens, in order to interrogate how the novel deals with, conforms to, and subverts notions of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. While many narrative threads in the text seem to naturalize the nuclear family as an ecological norm and a biological imperative, as opposed to a capitalist construction, I argue that the novel’s underlying themes and motifs assert a need for broader, non-biological familial networks as a means of countering the individualism and isolation fostered by capitalism. By linking family to the ecological world, and positioning capitalism and its tenets as a direct threat to both, the novel calls for a redefining and restructuring of family and community as a necessary tactic for disrupting environmental and social devastation, and healing both people and the natural world.