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
Ed Regis guides the visitors to the front of the visitor center, where electric Land Cruisers wait to whisk them around the island. Grant, Ellie, Malcolm, and Gennaro take the first car, leaving Tim, Lex, and Regis to ride in the second. Each car contains a display screen, CD-ROM player, walkie-talkie, and radio. Regis and the children use the intercom to listen in on an argument in the front car between Malcolm and Gennaro. The tour begins with a recording narrated by a famous actor—the park creators have “spared no expense.” At each stop, the transmitter lights blink and direct the on-board computer to play the correct track from the CD-ROM, including photographs of the relevant dinosaurs if they happen to be out of sight.
The park rides showcase cutting-edge technology for the time in which the book was published. In contrast to Hammond’s efforts to save money elsewhere, park operators planned the guest-facing parts of the park to impress. The driverless vehicles also reinforce the idea of the amusement park, suggesting the careful design of the entire experience and implying that guest experience remains under the complete control of the park operators.
Themes
The tour yields sightings of othnielia in the trees and hypsilophodontids in the tall grasses—the latter encouraged to appear thanks to the loudspeakers on the cars playing a mating call. The narration notes that the hypsilophodontids scratch their skin for reasons the park veterinarians have yet to figure out.
Using recorded mating calls allows human operators to apparently control the dinosaurs. But the animals’ instinctual reaction to the call—as well as their inexplicable itching—pointedly reminds readers that these animals are wild and mysterious, not tame and domesticated.
Themes
