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 cafeteria, John Hammond surprises Gennaro by calmly eating ice cream as if his grandchildren aren’t missing on an island overrun with carnivorous dinosaurs. Hammond has decided that they’ve all experienced just “a little breakdown” from “the storm or whatever” leading to a terrible, regrettable accident—Ed Regis’s death and Malcolm’s mauling. He expresses confidence that soon, Arnold will have the computer systems back online and Muldoon will have found the kids.
With the initial shock of the emergency over, Hammond calmly returns to asserting the rightness of his vision for the park. He trivializes Regis’s death and Malcolm’s grievous injuries, showing a selfish disregard for the suffering of others. And he doesn’t even show concern over his own family members, suggesting a deep and abiding narcissism. Instead of being humbled before nature, he ignores the signs of the park’s instability and asserts that he and his operators will soon have everything back under their control.
Themes
But in the control room, Arnold faces the daunting task of examining half a million lines of computer code. Wu reminds him that he can run a program to track the keystrokes Nedry made during the day. Within a minute, the computer produces this list. Arnold realizes that Nedry spent much of the day wasting time before accessing and trying to turn off the park’s security systems. He obviously hadn’t realized that they had transferred those functions to manual switches. Failing in his first attempt, he ran a command to open his trapdoor, then turned off the security and perimeter systems via the main computer. Arnold starts to turn the security systems back on, while Wu, noting that someone had accessed the freezers recently, goes to count the dinosaur embryos.
The gap between Hammond’s easy assurance and Arnold’s panicked attempts to fix the computer systems also suggests that some of Hammond’s bliss comes from his ignorance. He doesn’t really understand how complex the park system—or the science that recreated the dinosaurs—actually is.
Themes
Ellie stands in her room, about to change out of her wet clothes, when Muldoon knocks on the door. He tells her that he and Gennaro found Malcolm, badly injured, near the crumpled Land Cruisers and that he thinks Grant, Lex, and Tim are still alive but lost in the park. Dr. Harding, the closest person to a medical professional on the island, needs her help providing first aid to Malcolm. Ellie feels worried, but not panicked. She knows that Grant has gotten himself out of some bad situations before.
In contrast to Hammond’s callousness—he simply rejects the idea that his family members could be in any real danger, despite evidence to the contrary—Ellie worries about Grant and the kids. She neither panics nor denies her feelings, opting for a middle ground that acknowledges the dangers while still holding faith in Grant’s survival abilities.
Themes
