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.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Integration”
The next morning the anthropologist is gone, and the psychologist seems “shaken, as if she hadn’t slept. […] She was squinting oddly, her hair more windblown than usual. I noticed dirt caked on the sides of her boots. She was favoring her right side, as if she had been injured” (37). The psychologist tells the surveyor and the narrator that the anthropologist headed back to the border the night before because she was unnerved by what she saw in the tower. Both the surveyor and the narrator are suspicious, asking the psychologist various questions about the disappearance, but both ultimately accept the psychologist’s explanation.
They return to the tower. The surveyor and narrator prepare to descend into the tower, while the psychologist announces that she will remain at the entrance to stand guard. This makes the surveyor and narrator uneasy and slightly confused about the psychologist’s motives. The surveyor tells the psychologist that she needs to come down as well, but the psychologist hypnotizes the surveyor, and the surveyor relents. The narrator imitates the surveyor to seem as though she is still under the control of hypnosis.
After entering the tower, the narrator notes that the structure seems to be breathing, as though it were made of living tissue. She believes the tower is a living creature or organism. She tries to get the surveyor to feel the structure’s heartbeat, but the surveyor does not feel it. Descending further, the narrator feels, “for the first time in a long time, the flush of discovery I had experienced as a child” (46), when she used to study the natural inhabitants of an unkempt pool in her family’s backyard.
The surveyor and narrator agree to document the “physicality of the words” rather than their meaning because the sentence seems “never-ending” (47). They see hand-like creatures in the words and what look like the slimy trails of slugs on the ceiling. Small shrimp-like creatures walk along the ceiling as well. The narrator sees older layers of words beneath the newer ones. She is able to understand the meaning of some of them: “Why should I rest when wickedness exists in the world…God’s love shines on anyone who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness” (49). The narrator takes photos of the wall and collects samples.
As they continue to descend, the surveyor points out that words seem to be becoming “fresher.” The narrator tells the surveyor, “Something below us is writing this script” (51). They stop documenting and collecting samples and descend more rapidly. The steps are covered in a residue that the narrator notes is “slightly viscous, like slime” (53). She also notes strange marks in the residue and a set of boot prints that belong to neither the surveyor nor the narrator. The narrator reveals that her husband was on the 11th expedition into Area X, and that though he returned alive, he was significantly changed and died of cancer six months after returning. She wonders if her husband saw the same things she sees as she descends further into the tower.
They turn a corner, and the surveyor sees “a body or a person” (59) somewhere below. They retreat around the corner and discuss what to do. They decide to investigate. The narrator shines her light on the figure and sees that it is the body of the anthropologist. “[S]omething green” is coming out of her mouth, and a “faint golden glow arose from her body, almost imperceptible” (60). The anthropologist’s body shows signs of violence. The writing on the wall shows signs of disturbance, which leads the narrator to conclude that the anthropologist interrupted the writer of the words.
The narrator discovers another set of boot prints and assumes they belong to the psychologist. She imagines the psychologist put the anthropologist under hypnosis and gave her an order to collect a sample from the creature writing on the wall, and that the anthropologist “died trying, probably in agony” (63). The psychologist then fled back up the tower. After some discussion and tension, the surveyor and narrator prepare for conflict with the psychologist, who is waiting for them at the entrance of the tower. When they reach the entrance, though, the psychologist is not there. They search for her in the immediate surroundings near the tower but don’t find her. The narrator asks the surveyor, “Would you agree that her absence is a sign of guilt?” (68). The surveyor says, “No, I would not. Maybe something happened to her” (68).
They go back to base camp. The psychologist is not there either. “Not only wasn’t she there, but she had taken half of our supplies and most of the guns” (69). The surveyor decides to believe the narrator’s theories for the moment.
They spend the rest of the afternoon at base camp. The narrator looks at samples under a microscope, while the surveyor develops photographs. One of the anthropologist’s samples contains human brain tissue. “At dusk, the familiar moaning came to us from across the salt-marsh flats as we ate our dinner around the campfire” (74). They take turns keeping watch for the psychologist throughout the night. The narrator notices “a flicker of orange light” near the lighthouse (76). In the morning, the “brightness” affecting the narrator’s senses has spread to her chest. “I can describe it no other way. Internally, there was a brightness in me, a kind of prickling energy and anticipation” (83).
The narrator decides to go to the lighthouse in the hopes of gathering more information—perhaps from the psychologist, who might be hiding there. The surveyor chooses to stay behind at base camp rather than joining the narrator. The narrator attempts to hypnotize the surveyor, using words the psychologist sometimes used. The surveyor realizes what the narrator has tried to do and says, “You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to get your way” (85). The narrator asks if the surveyor will wait at base camp until she returns, and the surveyor tells her, “Fuck off.” The narrator leaves the surveyor “leaning back in that rickety chair, holding her assault rifle, as I went off to discover the source of the light I had seen the night before” (86).
Chapter 2 Analysis
There is significant character development in Chapter 2. What in Chapter 1 were mere suspicions of the psychologist’s untrustworthiness come to a head in Chapter 2, when she chooses not to descend into the tower with the surveyor and the narrator. These suspicions multiply when the narrator discovers evidence that the psychologist might have coerced the anthropologist to her own death. Finally, the suspicions are close to being confirmed when the narrator and the surveyor resurface from the tower and find that the psychologist has fled from her post.
However, nothing can yet be proven, and beliefs about the psychologist’s motives and behavior remain a source of conflict between the surveyor and the narrator, whose trust in one another begins to chafe in this chapter. The surveyor is a pragmatist, focused on the factual, logical surface of things with a military precision. When the narrator takes a risk and attempts to get the surveyor to feel the “heartbeat” of the tower, the surveyor begins to suspect that the narrator is losing her sanity, and more importantly, she loses trust and faith in the narrator. At the end of the chapter, when the narrator attempts to hypnotize the surveyor, what little trust there was is entirely swept away, leaving the future of their relationship uncertain.
We also learn significant backstory on the narrator’s life prior to the expedition. She reflects, “My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing” (44). As a child, the narrator took solace and interest in the rich ecosystem that developed in a pool in her family’s backyard. This is also where she developed the seed of her independence: “In all of this, I eschewed books on ecology or biology. I wanted to discover the information on my own first” (45). This independence not only will guide the narrator throughout her career as a biologist, but also will serve her—and possibly help her survive—during the expedition into Area X.
We learn that the narrator’s husband was on the 11th expedition, the one immediately prior to the narrator’s, and that it was a particularly difficult one. When the narrator’s husband returned from the expedition, he seemed to be an entirely different person: “There was an odd calm about him, punctured only by moments of remote panic when, in asking him what had happened, he recognized that his amnesia was unnatural” (56). The narrator’s husband died of cancer six months after returning from his expedition. Despite this context, the narrator strives to be seen as an objective narrator and tries to convince the reader that her reasons for volunteering for the 12th expedition were largely unconnected to her husband’s journey. She was:
[n]ot someone who volunteered for Area X because of some other event unconnected to the purpose of the expeditions. And, in a sense, this is still true, and my husband’s status as a member of an expedition is in many ways irrelevant to why I signed up (56).
The narrator’s relationship with her husband had been deteriorating for some time before her husband left for the 11th expedition, “in part because he was gregarious and I preferred solitude” (77). They argued largely based on the narrator’s need to be alone and the distance she kept from her husband. She says, “During one of our fights, he admitted as much—tried to make his ‘volunteering’ for the expedition a sign of how much I had pushed him away, before taking it back later, ashamed” (77). After her husband comes back from the expedition changed, it is the narrator who calls the authorities to take him in. Such clues prove that although the narrator says she has reasons for going on the 12th expedition that have nothing to do with her husband, there is a personal element to her journey—a motivation intimately tied up with her relationship with her husband.
