Summary
The novel begins with the image of the tower and descriptions of the ecosystem and "untroubled landscape" of the mysterious Area X (3). The narrator, a biologist specializing in "transitional environments," is part of an all-female expedition into Area X; the team includes an anthropologist, a surveyor, and their leader, a psychologist. A linguist was meant to join them, but decided to stay behind before they crossed the border. The biologist describes first the dubious circumstances of their crossing into Area X—the psychologist hypnotized them, allegedly to protect them from harmful hallucinations. Their mission is "to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp" (4).
They don't know how long the expedition will take or whether they'll make it out alive. They don't know how the environment will affect their bodies. They aren't allowed to transmit any communication to Southern Reach, the agency that sent them, "for fear of some irrevocable contamination" (7). For this same reason, they are only allowed analog recording devices, film cameras and journals. The biologist describes their "most outlandish equipment" as a "measuring device ... which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to 'a safe place.' We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red" (4).
The biologist communicates that their expedition is one of many expeditions that came before it, but that each expedition has faced its own set of anomalous circumstances. For example, members of the expedition immediately before theirs "simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border" (4).
When the expedition reaches the tower, or "tunnel" as the other members describe it, they must make their first decision as a group of how to proceed. The tower doesn't appear on the map or in the notes of any previous expeditions, meaning that it is either new to the landscape, appearing out of nowhere, or for some reason was intentionally omitted. The anthropologist suggests that they push forth towards the lighthouse and return to the tower after they know what lies ahead. The surveyor, who has a military background, says, "In this case I feel that we should rule out the tunnel as something invasive or threatening. Before we explore farther. It’s like an enemy at our backs otherwise, if we press forward" (13). The narrator and psychologist agree they should investigate the tower/tunnel first.
Before entering the tower/tunnel structure, the group has a close encounter with a wild boar. It smells them from over a hundred yards away and begins to charge. The surveyor kneels to get a better shot, and the biologist observes it through binoculars. The boar appears, to her, afflicted with some unrecognizable disease. She suspects parasites or something neurological. Before the boar is close enough for the surveyor to take a shot, it suddenly changes course and darts into the nearby woods.
The next morning they begin their descent into the structure. The surveyor leads the way. The walls are blank and yield no clue as to the structure's origins, who might've constructed it, or its intended purpose. On a lower landing, they discover writing on the wall, the letters formed from "fruiting bodies," fungus spores, green and slick cursive letters sticking six inches out from the wall. The message reads, "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…" (23). The biologist is entranced by the letters. She leans in close to inspect them, and one of the spores erupts in her face. She is sure she inhaled whatever material it emitted, but decides against telling the rest of the group. They have no idea what could be communicating with them in this way.
When they resurface, the psychologist, who has been keeping watch, goes down to see the message for herself. When they return to their tents, she hypnotizes the group; the biologist, however, quickly realizes that she isn't susceptible to her hypnosis. She mimics the anthropologist and the surveyor so as not to raise alarm in the psychologist. The biologist suspects that somehow the spore she inhaled in the structure has made her impervious to hypnosis. In keeping this secret, she begins to feel estranged from the other explorers.
For the remainder of Part 01, the biologist reflects on the materials they were shown during training, specifically the interviews recorded of members of earlier expeditions who somehow inexplicably left Area X, abandoning the mission, and crossed back over the border to the unaffected world. These former explorers returned to their families without reporting back to their superiors. Their returns were considered uncanny and disturbing. The biologist describes their demeanor as "almost dreamlike ... even the compact, wiry man who had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight apart. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space" (36).
Analysis
Annihilation begins in media res; the twelfth expedition into Area X is well underway as the narrator describes her group encountering the tower structure, which is not represented in any notes or maps from previous expeditions. The novel is narrated in the first person by a biologist whose connection to the expedition, at least for the entirety of Part 01, is not entirely clear. She was chosen because of her background in transitional environments; however, there are moments in Part 01 that seem to suggest that she had a relationship with one of the previous explorers. When describing the "dreamlike demeanor" of previous explorers, the narrator refers to the military expert on the eleventh expedition as "a person who’d had a mercurial and energetic personality" (36) presumably before he returned from Area X.
Because the narrative begins after such a meticulous training and conditioning period, and since the narrator attains so much of her knowledge and suspicions about Area X prior to the start of the novel, and furthermore since her account takes place in the form of a field journal, information is meted out in a way that keeps the reader questioning what they can trust and what about the account might be influenced by the strange and unprecedented conditions in Area X. The text self-identifies as a field journal early on; the biologist writes, "it was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal, like this one" (8) and yet there's no indication, thus far, of whether she's making entries as she goes, or whether the entire account is being related from outside of Area X or at some point in the future, if/after the expedition has reached a conclusion.
Each explorer brings a specific kind of expertise to the table, and each of their specialties involves a different methodology. The narrative emphasizes the distinctions between how the anthropologist, the surveyor, the biologist, and the psychologist inquire and interact with their surroundings and with each other. Their discovery of the tower derives its importance from the fact that it's the first time they have to make a decision together and their "first opportunity to test the limits of disagreement and of compromise" (13). In other words, with the psychologist at the helm of their expedition and their consciousnesses at the mercy of her hypnoses, they don't know how democratic their movements through Area X will be.
When the anthropologist suggests that they press on and postpone venturing down into the tower structure, the narrator writes, "How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to substitute a safer, more comfortable option" (13). It's a curiously phrased observation. By calling the anthropologist's suggestion predictable, the biologist seems to be suggesting some inherent quality of anthropology that errs toward comfort, caution, and self-preservation. Perhaps she's suggesting that choosing a safer course reflects human nature, and so it logically follows that the anthropologist, who studies human behavior and cultural development, would choose such a course. But she also calls her suggestion "prescient," which foreshadows some misfortune befalling the anthropologist.
Conversely, the biologist characterizes the surveyor as a person who barely registers human emotions like fear and, aside from hypnosis, seems impervious to the psychologist's efforts to keep tabs on their mental states. After the surveyor has declared that she thinks they should explore the structure before advancing to the lighthouse, the biologist says of her, "She had come to us from the military, and I could see already the value of that experience. I had thought a surveyor would always side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight." When the psychologist tries to glean how everyone feels about their decision to explore the structure, the surveyor in turn asks the psychologist how she feels. The biologist observes the psychologist smile and says, "she must have known any one of us might have been tasked with observing her own reactions to stimuli. Perhaps the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her" (13-14).
This first section of the novel emphasizes the subjectivity of each of their perspectives. The Southern Reach gave them specific instructions not to confer and compare notes in their journals so as to avoid bias. The biologist says, "Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth" (8). The theme of subjectivity is pressed further when the group discovers the structure which the biologist insists is a tower, while the rest of them consider it a tunnel. However, as they descend into the structure, the surveyor describes their descent in terms of levels, and the biologist rejoices: "This level. Something within me thrilled to the fact that my vision of a tower was not yet disproven" (20).
The theme of transition also emerges as a prominent theme early on. The narrator specializes in transitional environments, Area X is in a constant state of transition, and the explorers themselves undergo changes simply as a result of existing in the affected area. The biologist describes the feeling of freedom entering the Area: "While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination" (15-16). There is a two-way inquiry taking place between the explorers and Area X; though at the end of the first section, it remains unclear how the environment is investigating its human inhabitants.
