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
Muldoon and Gennaro speed across the island in the Jeep searching for the tyrannosaur. The radio crackles: Arnold calls to say that he’s found the giant dinosaur in sector 442. When Muldoon confirms that he’s picked up the dinosaur’s movements on the Jeep’s onboard computer, Arnold sternly reminds him to not hurt it. It is, after all, the park’s main tourist attraction. Focusing on tourists, after all that has gone wrong, strikes Muldoon as ridiculous.
Arnold’s tense exchange with Muldoon places the chief engineer solidly in John Hammond’s camp, more concerned with the wellbeing of the dinosaurs—and thus the park’s potential for making money—opposed to the safety and security of their guests. The operators’ greed causes massive collateral damage.
Themes
When Muldoon and Gennaro catch up to the beast, Muldoon shows the lawyer how to load the rocket launcher with doses of tranquilizer large enough to bring down a herd of elephants. He’s just guessing at the dose, since they still know so little about how dinosaurs behave and how their physiology works. People used to think of them as a group of barely differentiated lizards, but it’s becoming clear that they were nearly as diversified as mammals are today. And some of them, especially the raptors, seem incredibly intelligent. They close some of the distance between themselves and the dinosaur in the Jeep, then Muldoon exits the vehicle with the launcher. His first shot misses. His second shot also fails to tranquilize the animal. It charges, and Muldoon leaps back into the vehicle as Gennaro guns the engine and they drive away.
If one thing has become clear throughout the course of the book, it’s that humans cannot organize or control dangerous, messy nature. No matter how manicured the park is, the nature it contains remains wild. And in the spirit of kill-or-be-killed, Muldoon and Gennaro must stop the adult tyrannosaur’s rampage. Muldoon’s miniature lecture on dinosaur physiology and behavior—highlighting, as it does, how little the park’s operators know about these animals—pointedly dispels any illusion that the park’s staff can control the animals. The tranquilizer’s failure to stop the tyrannosaur merely emphasizes the park’s unruliness.
Themes
The river carrying Grant, Lex, and Tim back towards the resort buildings moves so fast now that it feels like an amusement park ride. In the distance, the river appears to end abruptly in a straight line. Grant suddenly realizes that the river ends in a waterfall. Despite his furious efforts, he can’t stop the raft—and its passengers—from going over into the pool below, where the tyrannosaur stands, patiently waiting for them.
The speeding river recalls the “ledge” of the Malcolm Effect, where the instability of a system becomes unstoppable, as well as the fact that this wild, unpredictable, dangerous place was supposed to be a manicured amusement park. And if readers needed another reminder that nature eludes human prediction and control, the fact that the un-tranquilized tyrannosaur guessed the path of its human prey and cut them off at the lagoon offers it.
Themes
From Grant’s perspective, the fall into the pool 50 feet below seems to take an eternity. When he resurfaces, he manages to pull himself and Tim from the water quickly, but he can’t find Lex, whose bright orange lifejacket dangles from the tyrannosaur’s jaws. After an agonizing moment, though, her gray and waterlogged body pops to the surface of the water. Grant knows they don’t have much time to escape as the tyrannosaur shreds the lifejacket, scanning for signs of their movement downstream. Then, he sees a dirt path with clear signs of human use leading behind the waterfall. They’re just ducking behind the water when the tyrannosaur turns, catching a glimpse of them before they disappear into an alcove full of the pumps and filters that run the river.
Luckily, Grant, Tim, and Lex all survive the trip over the waterfall relatively unharmed. Having lost sight of its prey, the tyrannosaur turns its sight in the direction it thinks their escape most likely: farther downstream. This is no pea-brained reptile, but an intelligent, thoughtful hunter capable of anticipating its prey’s movement and stalking them over long distances. The dinosaurs continue to act in ways the park operators did not predict.
Themes
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Lex worries that the dinosaur might have seen them ducking behind the waterfall while Grant inspects the alcove, looking for a phone to call the control room. The door—to a maintenance shed—is locked, but someone has helpfully scratched the code onto the keypad cover. When the door swings open, the children hesitate to enter the dark room, so Grant tells them to stay put. But then the door swings shut behind him and he’s left in darkness. A moment’s groping yields a handy flashlight, which illuminates the damp and slippery steps leading down into the maintenance shed. In the darkness beyond its beam, Grant hears animal movements.
It turns out that the waterfall is manmade, too, yet another part of the park’s attempt to emulate nature. The alcove behind the waterfall houses the massive amounts of equipment necessary to keep up the illusion, which also offer another reminder of the degree to which the park operators have deluded themselves. Because they can control the “natural” features they’ve created, they forget that they can’t exercise the same control over the living dinosaurs their advanced technology allowed them to make.
Themes
A small electric vehicle sits charging at the back of the shed, but as Grant approaches it, a dinosaur springs from the darkness at him. Instinctively, he shoots it with a tranquilizer dart. The animal—a juvenile male raptor, according to Grant’s assessment—falls to the ground, dazed. Excited by the discovery of one of the wild-bred animals, Grant nevertheless has the presence of mind to return to get the children. He discovers, much to his chagrin, that the door locked behind him and he can’t open it from the inside.
Earlier, the dilophosaurs’ mating ritual provided the first eyewitness evidence of dinosaur reproduction on the island; now Grant sees an actual, wild-born juvenile. Of course, it’s a raptor—the species that presents the most danger and represents the nature’s ability to evade human control.
Themes
Lex and Tim are waiting for Grant to return when the tyrannosaur’s head bursts through the waterfall. It swings wildly about but can’t find the children who have frozen in fear. When the dinosaur momentarily retreats, Tim and Lex slink as far back into the alcove as they can. The next time that the dinosaur pokes through the water, it sticks out an enormous, prehensile tongue and uses it to probe for the children in the darkness. After a minute or two, it finds Tim, wraps around his head, and starts to pull him towards the dinosaur’s gaping jaws. Lex grabs Tim’s waist and tries to pull him from its grip unsuccessfully. But just before the dinosaur can maneuver Tim into its jaws, it lets go and slowly pulls its head back through the waterfall.
Just when it seems as if the situation can’t possibly get worse, it does—solidly illustrating the power of the Malcolm Effect. A locked door separates Grant from the children—even when the park’s systems function properly, they create havoc. And the tyrannosaur continues to stalk the humans, apparently for sport.
Themes
