Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
In the control room, surrounded by chaos and mess, Arnold calls Malcolm’s room in the lodge. He’s trying to figure out why he can’t find the tyrannosaur or the missing visitors. Malcolm posits that the motion sensors cover an insufficient area of the park; he guesses that the 7% of unmonitored land is contiguous. Any person or dinosaur sticking to these areas will disappear from the computer’s sight. He guesses that Grant, Tim, and Lex might be following one of these unmonitored sections, the river, which provides a direct path back to base. Arnold hopes the missing visitors aren’t on the river—not only is the river difficult to navigate on foot, but it runs directly through the aviary.
The chaos and mess in the control room call attention to the chaos and mess in the park and stand in stark contrast to the very idea of “control.” It’s as if this chaos reminds Arnold of Malcolm, whom he consults now. And indeed, Malcolm proves himself yet again capable of seeing what the park designers can’t. It makes sense why Grant and the children would follow the man-made river—it’s a direct and easy-to-follow path back to the resort. But their choice to do so also exposes them to unknown dangers: first, they are out of the control room’s sight. Second, they are bound for the aviary.
Themes
This is dangerous territory because they only realized the animals’ territorial instincts after they’d gotten giant cearadactyls into the enclosure. They fight viciously among themselves and attack any other creatures—including humans—who invade their space.
The book has already introduced dinosaurs whose unexpected and dangerous behaviors surprised the park operators—the raptors’ intelligence; the compys’ and dilophosaurs’ venom—but the cearadactyls are too dangerous to even include on the tour. The operators have introduced the animals to their planned environment only to belatedly realize that these animals, too, evade their control.
Themes
In the aviary, Lex judges the incomplete lodge a “dump.” There’s no phone and dinosaur droppings cover every surface. A shadow passes over the trio as they trudge back to the raft. Grant looks up, entranced by the graceful flight of the big cearadactyls. But then one swoops down, nipping at the back of Lex’s head and drawing blood. They begin to run, throwing themselves to the ground when the dinosaurs swoop down at them. One manages to grab Lex, but it can’t lift her weight off the ground. Grant throws himself on the animal, knocking it off the girl and to the ground. The disoriented dinosaur rights itself and then stalks away on its wing claws. Grant realizes this vindicates another paleontologist’s theories about the animal’s movements, but another attack quickly motivates him to abandon scientific inquiry in favor of escaping the aviary as soon as possible.
The incomplete and dangerous lodge in the aviary stands as a metaphorical miniature of the half-finished, dangerous park itself. Human greed, arrogance, and lack of insight have doomed both. In this moment, Grant yet again finds himself slipping into the role of scientific observer, matching the behavior of the dinosaurs in front of him with received wisdom and current theories. His ongoing, habitual observational habits model the kind of vision the book claims is necessary for true insight and understanding.
Themes
When the raft drifts out of the giant aviary enclosure, Lex cheers. As they ride the river’s increasing currents, Tim asks Grant why he asked Wu about frog DNA the previous afternoon. Grant explains that animals reproduce in a stunning variety of ways, and that in some species there’s less differentiation between male and female than in humans. But before he can finish his explanation, the tyrannosaur bursts through the trees on the riverbank. It continues to follow them, but the density of the jungle prevents it from getting close enough to catch them. Frustrated after two failed attempts, it peels off and heads downstream. Ahead, the raft’s occupants hear the hooting call of the dilophosaurs.
In yet another example of nature behaving in unexpected ways, the tyrannosaur seems to be chasing Grant and the children for sport, or out of some vague animal annoyance, rather than for food. Harding and Malcolm just explained that the humans are too tiny to satisfy the giant animal; moreover, it recently had a dinosaur-sized meal. Like the raptors, the tyrannosaurs point towards nature’s ability to turn deadly, especially against human beings who remain vulnerable to chaos despite their intelligence and advanced civilization.
Themes
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In the lodge, Malcolm discovers from Ellie that the park doesn’t seem to have much in the way of emergency stores like flashlights, matches, or bottled water. He tells her he has a low opinion of Arnold’s and Wu’s “thintelligen[ce].” They think narrowly and miss the big picture. Like most Western scientists and engineers, they tell themselves that they want to know the truth about nature. But, Malcolm asserts, they just want to accomplish things. They’re so focused on whether they can do something that they don’t stop to wonder whether they should. According to Malcolm, scientific discovery always damages the natural world.
The lack of preparations for even easily predicted disasters, like the storm-related power outages the park experienced the night before, points yet again toward the park operators’ arrogant assumption that they have full control over nature on the island to the point that nothing harmful can happen. It also implicates their lack of vision and insight; choosing not to anticipate any potential disasters, they failed to prepare for any. Malcolm criticizes these faults—particularly limited vision—directly.
Themes
Ellie protests that without scientific exploration, humanity would lose valuable advances. But Malcolm cuts her off, pointing out that many so-called “advances” fail to deliver on their promises. Despite engineering and technological advances, people still spend the same amount of time doing housework in the 1980s as they did in the 1950s. Cavemen lived better lives, according to Malcolm. Twenty hours of effort a week went to securing food and shelter, and they could spend the rest of their unadvanced lives however they wished.
Ellie speaks up here for a kind of vision of scientific progress that includes care and oversight. She thus implicitly endorses a view of human progress with which Malcolm disagrees. Instead, he claims that innovations and technological advances don’t necessarily produce beneficial changes for human life because the technologies are no better or worse than the ways in which people use them.
Themes
On the river, Grant slows the boat to a cautious crawl despite the current. He and Tim both remember from the tour that the dilophosaurs have poisonous venom. Coming around a corner, they spot two, one standing on each bank of the river, hooting and mirroring each other’s movements. With growing surprise, Grant realizes they’re performing a mating ritual. Until they stop, they won’t allow the raft to safely pass. And it might last for hours. But while he tries to think what to do, the tyrannosaur approaches through the forest, distracting the dilophosaurs. Grant tells Lex and Tim to lie down in the bottom of the boat as they slide past. And after catching on the river bottom for an agonizing moment, the raft floats safely downriver.
Although ample evidence has supported Grant’s and Malcolm’s assertion that the dinosaurs are breeding—eggshell fragments and extra dinosaurs on computer scans, for instance—the dilophosaurs’ mating dance provides the first direct piece of evidence anyone has observed. Without knowing what to look for or where to look—remember that the river isn’t covered by the park’s video monitors—the operators couldn’t see activity going on beneath their noses.
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