Jean-Luc Nancy calls our attention to the need to "look squarely at our gaping lack. .. to confront ourselves: first, with utter awareness; then, in such a way as to really scrutinise ourselves' ( "Confronted Community" 25). Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopias The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) offer a unique ground to pursue this scrutiny. They portray both the human compulsion to erase finitude and the obsession for immunity, while critically exposing the way in which human communities are constructed. Hence, they deploy deconstructions not only of various genres, such as dystopia and castaway survivor narra- tives (Bouson, "Game Over" 141), but also of the notion of the organic or operative community, as defined by Nancy in The Inoperative Community.