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Fourth Iteration: Control (I)
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
Muldoon and Gennaro speed over muddy roads in the Jeep. Muldoon won’t relax until he makes sure everyone is safe and sound. As they round a curve, they see a leg—capped by Ed Regis’s shoe—lying in the middle of the road. While Gennaro tries not to vomit in horror, Muldoon examines the limb, determining that it was torn—not bitten—off by the tyrannosaur. The men wrap the leg in a tarp and stash it in the back of the Jeep before driving on. After a moment, they find the crumpled remains of the two Land Cruisers.
Muldoon treats Regis’s severed leg as just another sign he must interpret in the aftermath of the dinosaur attack. On the one hand, he demonstrates the kind of attention to detail that insight and understanding require. But, as Gennaro’s horrified reaction demonstrates, he also betrays the kind of casual disregard for human life that characterizes the park design and makes it so potentially dangerous.
Themes
Muldoon inspects the wreckage of the vehicles carefully, noting the crushed radio handset and Tim’s watch. The watch itself is broken, but the band is intact, suggesting to Muldoon that the kid took it off before crawling out of the vehicle alive and voluntarily. If that’s the case, Gennaro asks, where did the kid go? Muldoon consults tracks in the muddy road to see if he can determine that. Gennaro doesn’t share Muldoon’s optimism that anyone survived the attack, and his fears drive a grim determination not just to close the park but to utterly destroy it.
Muldoon reads the signs that remain after the dinosaur attack with care and attention. In contrast, Gennaro reacts impulsively, swinging from horror and disgust to anger. In the face of a chaotic world, the book suggests here, it is critical to keep a cool head. Acting without thinking—like Gennaro wants to do—led to the park’s creation in the first place, and undoing the damage the park has wrought will take more care.
Themes
Muldoon can’t determine where the kids went from the confusion of tracks in the road, but he sees enough evidence to bet that at least one of them—possibly both, and possibly at least one adult—survived. They need, he insists, to search the whole park. And then he hears a wheezing sound in the bushes. They find Malcolm, in shock and with a badly mangled leg, but still alive. Muldoon and Gennaro abandon the search for the others—even though Malcolm confirms that Lex survived the initial attack—in favor of getting Malcolm back to base for immediate medical attention.
Muldoon’s priority after the dinosaur breach is locating all of the surviving visitors. In a pointed irony, Malcolm—the very person who had the clearest vision of the park’s instability and imminent collapse—suffers the greatest consequences of this collapse.
Themes
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