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
Gennaro watches incredulously as Ellie prepares to follow Grant into the dinosaur’s tunnel. After she disappears, he tells Muldoon that he refuses to follow. But, Muldoon points out, Ellie and Grant expect him. If he doesn’t want to go in on his own, Muldoon offers to goad him with one of the anti-dinosaur shock sticks. Muldoon doesn’t expect the shock to kill him, just to make him uncomfortable and to cost him control of his bowels. Faced with two terrible options, Gennaro opts for the tunnel, approaching headfirst so that he can see where he’s going. Beyond the entrance, the tunnel drops off quickly, and Gennaro can’t control his descent. He falls face first onto concrete. Ellie and Grant wait for him, crouched silently behind some large steel junction boxes, out of sight of the herd of dinosaurs below.
In the end, Gennaro faces what he, Hammond, and the others have allowed to happen. But he resists this insight with as much strength as he can muster. Only physical threats, ultimately, compel him into the tunnel. Earlier, he willingly turned his eyes away from the dangers of the park project. As if to make up for this mistake, he enters the tunnel headfirst—but the book rebukes his earlier blindness by having him land flat on his face. Hindsight has limited benefits; humanity needs insight and foresight to survive, and Gennaro’s belated attempts to look before he leaps prove this.
Themes
As his eyes adjust, Gennaro realizes he sits on a ledge in a giant, subterranean structure filled with at least 30 raptors. Grant whispers in Gennaro’s ear that they’ve found the colony, which consists of four or six adults along with dozens of juveniles and infants. The youngest, he thinks, are only about four months old. A curious baby raptor climbs up onto the ledge where the humans hide, followed by an adult. Surprisingly, the adult doesn’t react to their presence; without any unhatched eggs, Grant postulates, the dinosaurs have relaxed their guard. As long as the humans stay quiet and don’t move too much, they’re unlikely to draw the animals’ attention.
The size of the raptor colony shouldn’t surprise Gennaro or anyone else; the computer scans conducted the previous afternoon revealed dozens of extra animals. Still, seeing is believing. And events in the raptor nest show how much humans still don’t know about dinosaur behavior and physiology. Earlier, Tim thought that the dinosaur could track him and his sister by smell, but in the nest, the adult dinosaurs neither see nor seem to smell the intruders.
Themes
Just then, the juvenile raptor with the radio collar hops onto the ledge next to Ellie. It whimpers in discomfort as the collar chafes its skin, drawing the attention of an adult. The trio of humans pass a tense moment as the adult approaches; Grant slowly pulls out a nerve gas grenade, but Gennaro points to indicate that Ellie isn’t wearing a mask. Grant switches to a shock prod. Ellie slowly, calmly eases the collar off the animal. It scampers away, followed by the adult. Finally, they can get to work. Through night-vision goggles, Grant counts the remains of the eggs to a total of 34 raptors hatched. Meanwhile, Ellie has realized that she can distinguish the juveniles by the markings on their heads. They’re in motion, so she’s not totally confident in her numbers, but she estimates about 33 infants and 22 juveniles.
Once more, Ellie and Grant demonstrate the proper way of looking at the world, with an attention to detail and with an eye to finding the patterns that will help them make sense of what they’re seeing. Grant’s count of the hatched animals doesn’t tally with Ellie’s survey of juveniles and infants, suggesting that some animals may, indeed, have escaped the island already.
Themes
While counting, Ellie also notices that when they aren’t playing, the babies—and adults—tend to line up along one of the cavern’s axes. While Grant and Ellie ponder the implications—maybe this indicates a hive intelligence among the raptors, like bees, or maybe there’s a breeze—Gennaro opens his watch and checks its compass. The animals orient themselves along a northeast-southwest line. But this doesn’t answer the question of why, either. Just as Grant and Ellie realize that they can’t definitively figure it out, all the raptors hop up and begin running down a tunnel leading off the cavern.
The raptors’ behavior at first seems random, but with attention, the three humans can begin to form some hypotheses about it. Still, this offers a stark reminder of how little they truly know about dinosaur behavior—and how little they’ll be able to learn now that Hammond’s recklessness has doomed these animals to extermination at the hands of the Costa Rican authorities.
Themes
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