Throughout Annihilation, the Biologist struggles to understand the natural world—in the swimming pool, the bay, and, of course, at many points during her mission in Area X, to name just a few examples. Choosing just one instance, one particular moment of her thought, what paradigms do you see shaping her thoughts about the relationship between humans and the natural world? Be specific about the passage of text that you’re referring to, since we may want to look at it in class.
7 thoughts on “Annihalation (Book)”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
A few things make Annihilation an unsettling read, beginning with the setting itself, which leaks into the biologist’s description of her surroundings and informs the way she conveys information to the audience. Area X is at once familiar and unfamiliar; it’s a world without humans, something we cannot, by definition, truly understand. I think this (and the change in the biologist’s mental state through the book) is well-described by the “tower” the group encounters. By giving readers a visual concept of the structure, we (and the biologist) known and fully acknowledge that this is a tunnel we’re dealing with — “I don’t know why the word ‘tower’ came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could have just as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building . . . looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination” (6-7). Since our only perspective on this place is through the biologist’s eyes, we have an inherent trust in her observations, even knowing that her mind is being affected by Area X as soon as she enters it. The difference between a tunnel and a tower, after all, are massive, the least of which being perceivable limits. Given her training and personality, the biologist is continually portrayed as clinical and reserved, relying on set theories (evolution, succession, reproduction) that are present in every basic bio course. What she experiences in Area X doesn’t quite fit into these parameters anymore. Specifically, the boundaries between species continue to blur, which is a core tenant of how we can define ourselves — humans — as a group. As an aside, I find it interesting that the biologist mentions that she “despises” anthropomorphizing animals, yet by the end of the novel, the samples she retrieves from moss and animals are human, and the Crawler contains the lighthouse keeper. She has no choice but to reject her previous understanding of natural functioning because those theories no longer apply in a place as wonky as Area X.
One particular moment in which the biologist grapples with the relationship between humans, other creatures, and the environment, is her return to base camp after witnessing the death of the psychologist. She hears the moaning sound that has persisted through every night of their presence in Area X, only this time she actually pays it attention and cares about the creature that produces the sound. Before her visit to the lighthouse, the existence of the moaning in the reeds at night is offhandedly mentioned as something that is normal within the area, but the biologist does not seem too invested in the source until her encounter with the being that moans becomes inevitable. While she is running for her life, she has a very small part of her that is curious to see what the creature is– curious enough to stop running away in order to see the creature. As she says, that part of her is very small and she successfully escapes from the encounter unscathed. She does not know, however, how human this creature is, and her relationship with nature in this regard is unknown. She is completely unaware of the humanity of the creature or the lack thereof, and what is natural or supernatural is even questioned. When describing the moaning, she says ” This close the sound was more guttural, filled with confused anguish and rage. It seemed so utterly human and inhuman, that, for the second time since entering Area X, I considered the supernatural,” (p 139). The biologist’s newfound confusion as to what counts as natural is evident in her inexperience with the creature in the reeds, and her desire to discover what makes the noise, despite the threat that it poses to her safety.
“But the longer I stared at it [destroyer of worlds], the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more i had a sense that I knew nothing at all–about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in the taxonomy–catalogued, studied, and described–irreducible down to any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately i would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth.” (175)
The biologist goes on later to say that this was similar to experience when she first saw the crawler, but a thousand times less intense. I think this feeling tears apart the biologist’s world. All her life she has been dedicated to science: research, cataloging, observing, classifying. I dont think it would be unfair to say that her worldview, like many people, is based on these principles. Thus, when she experiences this with the starfish and with the crawler, she has to question everything she knows about everything, including herself. Seeing the starfish and the crawler make her question the true nature of nature and herself, which leads to comments like “What can you do when your five senses are not enough”. To put shortly, her senses failed to comprehend her environment. I think in this experience she has realized she has encountered something humans cannot or perhaps are not meant to understand, which evokes a Lovecraft-esque atmosphere in this part of the story.
The biologist is undoubtedly introverted and unconcerned with social interactions, but we see a moment of annoyance, and perhaps misanthropy, on page 45. She describes in great detail her endless interest in the microworld of her pool – the dragonflies, the moss, the bullfrogs. Although she never directly acknowledges it, it is clear that her interest in the pool at a young age is maintained by her work as a biologist later on. While she sits by the pool, in awe of the small ecosystem that has formed, she acknowledges her parents inside; “Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human world usually did, some of it loudly.” She sees her parents and their lives as distractions from what she considers interesting and worth observation. The addition of the phrase “some of it loudly” confirms a preconceived suspicion that she has a bit of resentment towards her parents – not because of their relationship to her, but because they are part of the “human world”, which she considers “banal” and “messy”. This is intrinsically different from narratives she has previously made about her childhood expressing a lack of interest in other people – she is annoyed and considers people a distraction from nature.
In the flashback to the overgrown swimming pool from the biologists youth, her experience centers on the change that occurs at the pool. We follow her excitement as the pool turns from overgrown, to returning back to nature. Nature slowly reclaims the manmade pool with help from the biologist dumping her fish into the pool. Eventually “the pool had become a functioning ecosystem” p. (44) and it was devoid of human interference. It seems as if she is observing how humans had temporarily had control of this area and then in their absence, it was immediately reclaimed by the natural world. In this sense there seems to be an uphill battle for humans against the everlasting power of nature. The human world and the natural world do not exist at the same time in a location, it is either one or the other. This extends to her future work as a biologist in the field when she talks of areas she studied being bought for development. The death of nature was brought on by human use.
I thought this book was incredibly interesting. The way the reader is able to watch the Biologist’s mindset change is pretty remarkable; she brings attention to it at the end when she refers to her conversation with the psychologist, about switching sides. I thought this was shown pretty perfectly on pg 97- when she catches a glimpse of dolphins swimming up the canal she says “the nearest one rolled slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in the brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me, It was painfully human, almost familiar”. This unexpected realization is followed by her saying “I had the unsettling thought that the world around me had become a kind of camouflage.” (pg 98). Camouflage implies blending in, differences being imperceivable. Here, she is allowing the line between human and animal/environment to be totally blurred. If a dolphin can be hauntingly human, a lot of other things in Area X can be too. As a biologist she was used to having a study-able predictable surrounding environment, but as the brightness in her progresses the world and the distinctions in it become more and more warped. The most extreme and final case of this is with her almost psychedelic encounter with the crawler. At the beginning of the novel, the crawler seems incredibly inhuman, yet by the end the Biologist is able to identify it not only as human but as the Lighthouse keeper, a specific individual. The Biologist’s thoughts on the relationship between humans and the natural become increasingly fluid.
The Biologist has many interesting thoughts about how one goes about observing the world. It is clear that she is interested in observation of the natural world, since that is what a biologist is taught to do, and that is what she loved to do at the pool at her family’s old house. However, there is something different about the way each person observes the world, which the Biologist makes the point of relating to the reader. One part where I particularly noticed the Biologist’s differences in observation of the world around her was on page 48, when she is in the tower, and she mentions “things only I could see”. We become aware that her observations are different than the Surveyor’s, and she can’t trust that others have the same view of the world as she does. I am interested in this as a commentary on first-hand observation, because often times a single person’s observations are not taken as fact, because they can be considered to be personally biased, so in that sense it is hard to know what to believe. We are reading from the perspective of the Biologist, so we take her opinion to be truth, but all the other characters hold different perspectives of what is real and what is not, particularly in this passage, where the surveyor cannot tell that the walls are alive, but the Biologist can. It is one word against another, which makes for an interested dichotomy of true and false. Furthermore, the idea of observation and seeing nature is similarly skeptical at this point. Are you supposed to believe what you see? How can you believe it when, as the Biologist says of the tower earlier on, “we had no sense of its purpose.” The nature around the characters reciprocates that observational perspective, giving the whole story an eerie, unnatural feeling.