36 pages • 1 hour read
Jeff VanderMeerAnnihilation
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Purity of Nature Versus the Dirtiness of Society
At the beginning of Chapter 5, the narrator says, “I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity” (155). She then lists many qualities of cities that did not agree with her: “[t]he dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction” (157). Instead, the narrator presents herself as most at home in the pure air and solitude of natural habitats. Growing up, for example, she escapes the problems of her parents by studying the ecosystem that develops in the family’s backyard pool. During a research grant, she wanders out into tidepools by herself to study a starfish, ignoring the eyes and opinions of the locals in the village. Even in Area X, the narrator prefers the problems posed by the organisms she studies to the complications that arise through her relations with other humans. Though this penchant for solitude causes problems in her marriage, it serves her well in Area X, where both the surveyor and the psychologist note that she is adapting so well that she seems to be favoring the new environment to her old one. The surveyor and psychologist’s intuitions prove correct when the narrator chooses to remain behind in Area X at the end of the novel, a decision that also signals the narrator’s deep preference for natural habitats over synthetic or suburban ones.
The Coexistence of Mundanity and Mystery
Chapter 4 ends with the narrator letting out a fit of laughter and recalling a moment before crossing into Area X: “I could distinctly recall wiping the spaghetti and chicken scraps from a plate and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of [my husband’s] reappearance” (153). Earlier in the novel, while resurfacing from the tower after discovering the anthropologist’s body, the narrator makes a similar note of the juxtaposition between the quotidian and the bizarre: “How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling” (68). These statements make explicit a thread running through the entire novel in which the common—everyday flora and fauna, for example—are depicted in a strange new light—such as possessing uncanny and human qualities. That is, in almost every chapter, everyday natural phenomena are imbued with magic and fantasy. In this way, the novel acts as a subtle endorsement of the beauty of natural habitats. By depicting nature alongside the uncanny and magical, the author suggests that the two realms—the natural and the supernatural—share qualities and support one another.
Death as Transformation
The narrator of Annihilation witnesses evidence that suggests that rather than dying, the previous members of expeditions into Area X have been in some way reincorporated into the environment, often as living organisms such as boars, dolphins, or moss. Musing on this evidence, she notes, “Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border” (145). This assessment is later confirmed when the narrator evaluates samples of such creatures and finds that they are human.
The words written on the wall of the tower by the Crawler seem to further suggest an interconnection between the processes of death, birth, and sustenance: “There shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy that shall bloom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain the passing of an age…” (170). Though cryptic, the language on the walls alludes to a natural process in which that which is killed and consumed provides sustenance, and therefore, ultimately, birth and growth. In this way Area X is both a reflection of the natural world as it is known and a magical version of it: Those who die not only metaphorically become part of their environment but literally become part of it as well, in the form of new and different organisms.
