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
Grant wakes up, sore and stiff, in the soft light of dawn. He finds Lex feeding hay from the maintenance building’s stores to a baby triceratops that has stuck its head through the fence bars. She’s named it Ralph, after one of her classmates. Grant tries but can’t get through to the control room on the shed’s phone. Suddenly, in response to a sound outside the fence, the baby dinosaur becomes agitated. Grant and Lex have to help it pull its head back through the bars as an adult triceratops appears and herds the baby away. When Grant prepares to go out into the exposed field to wave at the motion sensors, Lex and Tim insist on going with him.
Despite her fear of the tyrannosaur, Lex’s tendency to anthropomorphize the less frightening animals—babies and herbivores like “Ralph”—shows how easy it is for humans, with their intelligence and advanced technologies, to assume that they can understand or control nature. And despite Arnold’s early assurance that the park was just about back under control, the ongoing phone jamming suggests otherwise.
Themes
In the pre-dawn light, the meadow looks peaceful. The adult and juvenile triceratops amble towards a flock of duckbilled dinosaurs congregated near the lagoon. In the distance, a giant apatosaurus raises its head above the tree line. A gigantic, prehistoric dragonfly lands on Tim’s arm. Grant, Lex, and Tim approach the nearest sensor, but it seems to be offline, so they strike farther into the field.
It's not just the phones that are down, it’s the motion sensors, too, or at least some of them. And the malfunctioning of the park systems draws Grant and the children deeper into the field, exposing them to increasing danger rather than keeping them safe.
Themes
In the control room, Arnold stares blearily at the computer screens. He stayed up through the night trying to restore the phone lines without success. Wu suggests that they reboot the entire system to clear whatever jamming program Nedry initiated. Arnold doesn’t like the idea, but they need phone lines urgently; Gennaro arrives with the report that Malcolm is getting sicker. Reluctantly, Arnold turns off the safety systems, then shuts the park down completely.
The park’s overreliance on the computer system means that issues like the phone lines being jammed aren’t isolated but can lead to catastrophic failure. And the isolation that protected the island from scrutiny by regulatory bodies, investors, and competitors also means that, without its phone lines intact, it completely loses contact with the rest of the world. Finally, Arnold shows clear signs of fatigue; as the only person capable of dealing with the technical issues, he also becomes a single point of the park’s success—or failure.
Themes
In the apatosaur paddock, Lex catches a foul odor on the breeze just a few seconds before panic seizes the herd of duckbilled dinosaurs. The adult tyrannosaurs bursts from the trees, scattering the herd and setting off a stampede. Grant, Lex, and Tim run.
The experience of Grant, Lex, and Tim belies Hammond’s assumption of control over nature itself. In the park, away from the protection of the visitor center, the guests become just more prey for the tyrannosaurs.
Themes
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In the control room, Arnold waits 30 seconds and then tries to restart the computer. For a sickening moment, nothing happens. Then he remembers that he must restart the safety systems first. The computer obediently comes back to life when he flips the switches. The computer system isn’t supposed to ever be turned off, so in the event of a crash it requires manual rebooting. The systems come back to life just in time to give Gennaro and Arnold onscreen footage of the tyrannosaur attacking the flock of stampeding hadrosaurs. Arnold asks Gennaro to tell Muldoon that he needs to go investigate the situation. In the field, Grant, Lex, and Tim see the stampeding dinosaurs from a very different vantage point as they crouch behind a rocky outcropping to avoid being trampled. When the coast is clear, they climb a tree.
As it turns out, the park’s systems are only fully automatic so long as they keep functioning. When anything happens to disrupt them, they require a fully manual reboot. Wu explains the rationale behind this choice to Gennaro, but it also illustrates the importance of human direction to technological systems. Without operators, the computer system itself doesn’t know what would be helpful or harmful to do. Readers should pay attention to the role of the operator—Arnold—who must bring all the modules back online in the correct order. And if the park operators needed another reminder of how little humans actually control, they regain the full use of the park’s computer systems just in time to see the tyrannosaur attack.
Themes
