51 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonThe Lost World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Eggs and Hatchlings
Much attention is given to the nests of the island’s dinosaurs. Dr. Levine is fascinated by the gentleness and care the T. Rex parents lavish on their eggs and their hatchlings. Eddie is too taken by the tiny dinosaurs that he cannot bring himself to kill the wounded baby and takes it back to the trailer despite the risks. For different reasons, the crew from Biosyn are also fascinated by the eggs save they see them as commodities that can be taken and then patented and then developed as a potential goldmine investment. Whatever their motivation, scientific curiosity, compassion, or greed, characters are much taken by the eggs and the hatchlings of the island’s dinosaurs.
The problem is that the dinosaurs on Isla Sorna are doomed. The first-generation dinosaurs had been poisoned by the food given to them by InGen and that the toxins are working their way through the ecosystem. The focus on the eggs then becomes a powerful symbol of the determination of life to continue. After all, these eggs were not artificially created in InGen’s elaborate laboratories.
The chapters set in the nests offer gentle moments of authentic familiar bonding. As he watches the parents feed the tiny babies, Thorne, a gruff man not given to shows of emotion, is delighted. The parents, the terrors of the island, bob their heads up and down and run their snouts against each other to entertain and calm their babies. It was, Thorne decides, “almost like a dance” (161). The commitment to nesting and to their young underscores the message that Malcolm and Levine both find in their explorations into the dynamics of the dinosaur community on the island. In the face of a grim endgame, the dinosaurs respond with the promise of new life.
The High Hide
The Lost World investigates the dynamics of how science interacts with nature and considers what the appropriate role of science is when it comes to engaging with the natural world. Interference and manipulation of nature, degrading it into a commodity and in turn disrespecting its complexity and its rich beauty is clearly the way of Biosyn. They dismiss the island’s rich beauty and disregard the implications of stealing the fertilizing eggs of the island’s dinosaurs. For them the island is more like a bank to be robbed—they time their raid to be on the island no more than 4 hours. Get it, get out, don’t look back.
Contrasted to that is the observation tower, called a high hide, that Thorne designs and constructs per the instructions of Levine. The twenty-foot aluminum tower, which appears thin and delicate, is in fact built to withstand any potentially disastrous interaction with the animals. But the tower symbolizes not so much fort-like protection and isolation from the animals as it does the chance to observe the animals, firsthand and close up. In this, Levine’s high hide symbolizes what the novel sees as the most appropriate interaction between humanity and nature.
“From their vantage point, [Arby and Kelly] could look down across the wide valley,” Crichton writes (178). The team watches dinosaurs feeding; they watch them gather and share the watering hole; they watch them parade about the open valley all the while trumpeting calls to each other. That, Levine assures a dubious Malcolm, is why he wanted the tower in the first place: “We want to make round-the-clock observations of the animals […] a full record their activities” (179). The tower is not so much an impregnable fortress as a laboratory. In this, the observation tower symbolizes a dynamic defined by careful distance, respect, curiosity, and the willingness to observe rather than interfere.
Machines
Through much of the novel’s First and Second Configuration sections, we are treated to an inventory of the vehicles Dr. Levine commissions from Jack Thorne’s Mobile Field Systems conglomerate. The inventory includes two specially outfitted RVs, a massive battery-powered Ford Explorer SUV, and a souped-up motorcycle with modified handling mechanisms for the island primitive roads. The team from Biosyn brings along its own Jeep. In addition, Dr. Levine pedals about the island on his bicycle; an ancient powerboat waits in the abandoned boathouse; a boat bring Harding and the Biosyn team to the island; and both teams use the mobility and power of helicopters. The machines stand in contrast to the prehistoric beauty of Isla Sorna. Team members are constantly deploying these transportation vehicles to make their way across the island. However, the machines are noisy, intrusive, and at times unreliable. These very expensive, very sophisticated cutting-edge gadgets symbolize how out of place humanity is in the lush green chaos of the jungle itself.
Prions
The fall of the Lost World is brought about ironically enough by the simplest disease-causing entities known to medical science, prions, protein fragments smaller even than a virus. These proteins lock Isla Sorba into the endgame of extinction. When InGen first went into production at Site B where the first generation of infant dinosaurs was manufactured, the research teams had not planned ahead sufficiently to budget food for the rapidly growing animal population. When the infants outgrew the benign goat’s milk, the team scrambled for a food substitute. They opted to use ground-up sheep, a cheap source of food for animals that is seldom used in zoos because of the risk that sheep carry prions. Eating the ground-up sheep that had the toxic prions the dinosaurs began a closed circuit of infection: animals excreted the toxin and then scavengers would eat it and in turn pass the toxin on to animals that ate them.
The parable of the prions then gives the novel its sense of tragedy. An apparently minor decision ends up destroying the dinosaurs’ entire ecosystem. Prions then symbolize humanity’s carelessness when it comes to managing nature. The poor planning by InGen researchers, their lack of foresight, their sheer indifference to the details, and their decision to allow cost to drive their decision reflect the realities of humanity’s blundering mismanagement of nature.
Related Titles
By Michael Crichton
