For this week, let’s finish reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. And, you’ll need to complete another reading journal entry for this last half of the novel. (To to this, simply insert a page break into your existing reading journal on google docs and label it “Annihilation: Part 2.”)
Things get pretty crazy in the final chapters of Annihilation. [Spoilers ahead.] One of the things we may know for sure: the expedition meets its untimely end – – in a variety of ways. The biologist is the “final girl.” And yet, the novel prods us to ask: is the biologist even really “the biologist” anymore?
One important motif that this section of the novel underscores is: transformation. After inhaling the freaky spores inside the “Tower,” the biologist reports her fears about her own “contamination” and subsequent transformation. Can you list all the literal transformations that seem to occur in Annihilation? The dolphins with human eyes are one obvious example, but try to make as complete a list as you can of other physical/material metamorphoses. What do these transformations seem to tell us about Area X? How does the biologist respond to the transformations she witnesses or suspects? Does this response change? How does “transformation” play into her understanding of Area X? Ultimately, she settles on a description of Area X as a “thorn,” “a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world.” What do you make of this image of Area X?
Obviously, the biologist is also transforming, especially in terms of her consciousness and sense of identity. In at least one of these changes, she seems to begin to understand more about her husband and her relation to her husband. Equally, her relationship to nature seems to change. How does she approach nature at the beginning of the novel? How does she understand her relationship to nature by the end of the narrative? Hint: what does her statement towards the conclusion – – “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivation selfish.” – – tell us about this change? Earlier in the story, she talks about the need “to wage a guerrilla war” against Area X. Is this still her attitude toward Area X by the end of the novel? Another way of thinking about this shift is through the list of spaces she provides at a certain point in her story: “A swimming pool. A rocky bay. An empty lot. A tower. A lighthouse.” What seems to unite these spaces? Or, more importantly, how do these spaces chart the shift in her relationship to place and nature?
Finally, the title: Annihilation. Who first uses this term in the novel? How and why do they use it? In the final pages, the biologist asks herself: “Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?” We usually think of annihilation as meaning extinction or total obliteration. By the time you finish VanderMeer’s book, do you think this meaning is still relevant? I.e. is VanderMeer trying to encourage us to think differently about “annihilation” and the idea that we can completely erase or destroy something – – including nature? In VanderMeer’s sense, who or what is the most “annihilated” person in the book?