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, Arnold breathes a sigh of relief as he confirms that the tyrannosaur is “down.” The park, he feels, is finally back in order. Muldoon’s second shot must have hit the beast, but it took an hour for the tranquilizer to take effect. Arnold wants to rub his success in Gennaro’s face; he arrogantly points out that “the park is now completely back to normal,” just as Gennaro notices a warning flashing on the system monitor behind Arnold. It says “AUX PWR LOW,” which confuses Arnold, who thinks that the main power is on. As the warning turns red and begins to count down, Wu suggests that Arnold print out a system status log.
Arnold’s sense of regained control fails abruptly, proving the illusory nature of human control over nature. The park’s cascading failures also exemplify the Malcolm Effect. In addition, it’s worth noting that Arnold seems to have forgotten about the still-missing Grant, Lex, and Tim. His sense of pride in his own power outweighs a concern for the health and safety of others.
Themes
In the park, Tim cautiously peers out from behind the waterfall. The tyrannosaur is tranquilized, not dead. Tim notices the dart still stuck in the back of its head. While he stares, the waterfall slows to a trickle and stops completely, and then the door to the maintenance shed pops open. Grant beckons Tim and Lex inside.
The power outage represents yet another stage in the park operators’ loss of control, but in the moment, it proves an unexpected boon to Grant and the children, allowing them to regroup and head back to the resort.
Themes
In the control room, Arnold stares at the system status log in disbelief. When he restarted the computers earlier that morning, the system reverted to auxiliary power, as it was designed to. Arnold knows this, but because he hasn’t ever needed to turn the system off, he forgot that the main power hadn’t been restored when the lights and systems can back on in the control room. This means, as he confesses to Muldoon and Gennaro, that the park has run exclusively on auxiliary power since 5 a.m. And the fences require too much electricity to run on auxiliary power. They have been off for hours all over the park. Even the velociraptors’ fence.
The generator shuts down due to a combination of human error—Arnold forgot to switch the park systems back to main power after he rebooted the computers earlier in the day—and an overreliance on mechanical systems and the control room’s interfaces to give park operators the full picture. Because it didn’t occur to Arnold to check the source once electricity was restored, he missed an important piece of information. And deadly consequences ensure when the raptors (i.e., nature) escape human control.
Themes
The men in the control room hear a scream in the distance as Muldoon snaps into action, handing out radios and giving orders. He tasks Arnold with turning on the main generator and tells Wu—the only person besides Arnold who understands the computer system—to stay in the control room. Hammond pensively demands to know what Muldoon plans to do with “[his] animals,” but Muldoon orders him to run to the lodge, shut the doors, and stay put. Gennaro wants to run away, but he chooses to follow the park warden to the weapons cache. Muldoon warns him that dinosaur physiology makes them very hard to kill. And, although the park officially has eight raptors, they only have six shells.
Hammond faces the same lethal danger as everyone else still alive on the island, but his greed and arrogance keep him from seeing or feeling it. He’s more concerned about protecting his investment in the dinosaurs than everyone’s lives, including his own. And it doesn’t matter how many raptors the park officially has; the raptors are one of the reproducing species. Jurassic Park will never have enough ammunition to neutralize all of the animals, due to the operators’ greed and lack of foresight.
Themes
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Muldoon and Gennaro leave the visitor center in time to see three raptors closing in on Arnold, who cowers in front of the power plant door. Muldoon drops to his knee and asks Gennaro to load a shell into the rocket launcher; it takes the inexperienced lawyer two tries to get it right. Gennaro watches as one of the animals explodes, falling victim to Muldoon’s well-aimed shot. The raptors turn in the direction of the shot, moving menacingly towards Muldoon and Gennaro. Muldoon shoots again, injuring one in the leg, before he and Gennaro start to run. In the control room, Wu listens in horror to the sound of shots and screaming. But he can’t leave the control room, or he won’t be ready to restart the main generator. Outside, Muldoon sprains his ankle and tumbles down an embankment, pursued by the raptors, while Gennaro runs in the opposite direction.
Early in the book, readers got a glimpse of the raptors and their terrifying potential as hunters when Grant, Ellie, and Malcolm visited their enclosure. Now that they’ve escaped, readers—and horrified park operators and guests like Arnold, Muldoon, and Gennaro—get to see these powerful animals in action in broad daylight. These animals are equally fascinating—their coordinated behavior suggests an almost human-like intelligence and sense of cooperation similar to that shared by humans—and terrifying. The park operators have lost their illusion of “control” completely: Wu hears and sees events from the control room, but he cannot interfere in them.
Themes
In the lodge, Ellie helps Dr. Harding administer more morphine to Malcolm. When Hammond arrives to check on his guest, he glumly reports that the raptors escaped. He’s reluctant to admit that Malcolm, who predicted a failure of fence integrity, was right. In frustration, Hammond protests that he had a simple, elegant idea for the park. This enrages Malcolm, who decries Hammond’s scientific power as a form of inherited wealth. Most people attain power only through years of hard work and discipline, which teaches them responsibility. But scientists, especially those who have the benefit of modern technology, have neither mastery nor humility toward nature. The main problems with Hammond’s plan, according to Malcolm, arise from his twin beliefs that just because he could resurrect dinosaurs he should, and that creating them meant he could control them.
As an outsider to the park project—and, crucially, as a person who won’t gain fame or wealth by its success—Malcolm has a better vantage point from which to assess the whole premise. In contrast, Hammond’s greed, pride, and denial limit his field of vision to those facts that tend to reinforce (or at least not contradict) his predetermined ideas. His ongoing assertions of simplicity attest to the depth of his delusion that human beings have dominion or control over nature thanks to their advanced intellects and technologies. And in this scene, Malcolm directly calls out the arrogance and hubris underlying much of late 20th-century scientific research: the accelerating pace of discovery, building on previous research and innovation, doesn’t leave enough time for the philosophical questions that should attend scientific research and technological development: not just whether one can, but whether one should.
Themes
Muldoon radios Wu in the control room to ask if Arnold has succeeded, and to explain that he’s stuck, wedged into a drainage pipe just out of the raptors’ reach. Meanwhile, barely containing his panic, Arnold opens the door to the maintenance shed. The power outage has cut the lights, and he didn’t think to bring a flashlight. Leaving the door cracked open a few inches provides enough daylight to work with, so he props it with one of his shoes. While he creeps along the catwalk, the light disappears. A velociraptor stands in the doorway. He backs away slowly until he can scramble down the steep and narrow steps, confident that the animal can’t manage them. It can’t—but it jumps nimbly off the catwalk and lands a few feet behind him. The auxiliary generator lies just beyond reach when the raptor’s claws slam into his back.
While Hammond and Malcolm argue about the philosophical basis of modern science, everyone outside of the lodge contends with the consequences of reckless experimentation: the escaped dinosaurs. Arnold’s choices here demonstrate a stunning lack of insight into the behavior of the animals he was charged with overseeing as the park’s chief engineer. His missteps mirror, and thus critique, the missteps of the park as a whole. He leaves vulnerabilities in the system (the shoe propping the door open), and he underestimates the dinosaurs’ capabilities. And he pays for these mistakes with his life.
Themes
Gennaro doesn’t like living dangerously, but he thinks he has a plan. Assuming that the raptors wait on the south side of the maintenance shed, he circles around and approaches from the north. He finds Arnold’s shoe propping the door open and leaves it while he continues inside. Although he doesn’t know where he’s going and he forgot his radio, he’s confident that he can identify—and start up—the generator. Gennaro freezes when he hears an animal snarl, and something—blood!—starts to drip on his shoulder. Above him, perched on a pipe, sits a raptor. It has an injured leg, and he’s able to fight it off momentarily. While he looks around for a weapon to use to kill it, it disappears. And then he feels teeth close around his hand and something yanks him off his feet.
If Arnold’s encounter with the raptors mirrors failures of the park creators and operators, Gennaro’s attempt to restart the generator mirrors his relationship with the park, too. His overconfidence in his ability to fix the situation leads him into the maintenance shed without a plan and without the proper background knowledge to accomplish the task (it’s questionable whether he actually could recognize and restart the generator without instructions). Similarly, fully confident that he understood Hammond and that he had the power and knowledge to stop the park project from going too far, Gennaro failed to provide the necessary close oversight that might have prevented the unfolding catastrophe.
Themes
Over the radio, Muldoon and Wu make plans to regroup and join the others at the lodge. While they wait, Malcolm tells Ellie and Hammond that the park operators’ attempt to control nature represents the logical conclusion of Western attitudes dating back to the Renaissance. New scientific ideas promised a rational and objective way to look at the world. But after a few centuries, science has demonstrated its limits. It grants enormous power but doesn’t help anyone figure out how to use that power responsibly. And it offers an empty promise that humanity can understand and control nature. Chaos theory proves the inherent unpredictability of life on earth, and now humanity faces an imminent, major paradigm shift. Hammond coos pityingly over Malcolm, implying his delirium. But the right-minded Malcolm points out the extreme unlikeliness that any of them will escape the island alive.
Ultimately, while the egos, greed, and work of a few specific men (especially Hammond, Wu, and Gennaro) led to the creation of Jurassic Park, Malcolm warns that the issue transcends this one example. Arrogance has been baked into western scientific progress for centuries. The number of things that humans could track, understand, and predict grew, allowing humanity to feel an ever-greater sense of control over the world around it. But powerful forces remain in the natural world and in human nature, and they’ve proven more difficult to predict (such as the weather or he surprising adaptations of evolution) or counteract (such as flaws like greed and pride in human nature).
Themes
