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
Ellie and Grant find the idea of the raptors migrating exhilarating. But they don’t have long to celebrate the discovery before they hear an approaching helicopter. As it lands, the dinosaurs scatter. Soldiers rush to escort Grant, Ellie, and Gennaro onboard. Tim, Lex, and Muldoon are already strapped in. Muldoon tells the newcomers that a second helicopter took Dr. Harding and the remaining workmen; someone found Hammond’s body where the compys left it; Malcolm died. As the helicopter races toward the mainland, Grant hears bombs falling from other aircraft over the island. He wonders where the raptors would have migrated to if they could, and he feels both sad and relieved that they won’t have the opportunity. The Costa Rican soldiers beg to know who’s in charge. Grant says, “No one.”
Grant and Ellie have just witnessed evidence of a behavior previously unknown and unstudied in dinosaurs. But the Costa Rican authorities arrive to shut down the island and its experiments permanently. The very interference that Hammond most feared has arrived to destroy his legacy, although he didn’t live to see it. The book intends for readers to identify with Grant’s viewpoint in the end. Any chance to responsibly resurrect dinosaurs through genetic sequencing and cloning technologies has essentially been foreclosed by Hammond’s reckless experimentation; Grant, Ellie, and the others essentially witness a second extinction of the dinosaurs. Still, their humbling experiences on the island have reminded them—and readers—of how fragile humans really are and how dangerous the world around them can be. Thus, relief accompanies Grant’s sadness.
Themes
