Summary
Section 02, titled "Integration," begins with the biologist's description of waking up the morning after the exploration of the tower structure feeling unusually refreshed and with heightened senses. She wonders whether these could be possible effects of the spores but says, "I felt so refreshed that I didn't really care" (37). Her positivity quickly breaks down when she discovers that the anthropologist is gone. She and the surveyor demand from the psychologist, who the biologist observes seems shaken, "as if she hadn't slept," to know where the anthropologist has gone (37). The psychologist offers the explanation that late last night, the anthropologist expressed fear of what lies within the structure and decided to leave Area X and return a partial report to their superiors.
The biologist isn't sure whether to believe the psychologist or not, but is torn between expressing her suspicion and risking a breakdown in order that may impede their expedition and her desire to explore the tower, which she has committed herself to doing before leaving Area X. The biologist chokes down her suspicions and concurs with the psychologist that they should continue the expedition, but adds that "her pointed stare to the surveyor made it clear to both of them that we would revisit the issue of the anthropologist later" (39).
When they reach the mouth of the tower structure, the psychologist assumes her position of standing watch over the entrance. Both the surveyor and the biologist take issue with this, and the surveyor vocalizes her discontent, tightening her grip on her assault rifle. The psychologist utters a hypnotic incantation, and the surveyor's rage abates, and she concedes to the psychologist's wish to stay at the entrance of the tower and stand watch, saying "You're right ... Of course, you're right. It makes perfect sense" (40). The power the psychologist yields through hypnosis unnerves the biologist.
The surveyor and the biologist descend into the tower, and immediately the biologist sees that the tower is not made of stone, as the psychologist hypnotized them to continue thinking, but that the walls were breathing, that the material of the tower was somehow organic, a living, breathing organism. When the biologist grabs the surveyor's arm to make her touch the walls, the surveyor snaps back. She doesn't perceive the walls as organic; she, in her hypnotized state, continues to see them as stone. She's also concerned because, from her perspective, the biologist is hallucinating that the walls are breathing. The biologist assures the surveyor that she isn't hallucinating. She lies and says she sees now that the walls are stone. The surveyor agrees to push forward but threatens to hurt the biologist if she touches her again.
The biologist then recalls a feature of her childhood, her "lodestone," the go-to explanation as for why she became a biologist: an overgrown, algae-filled pool in her parents' backyard (43-44). Her negligent parents were too absorbed with their own lives to bother with the pool, so the biologist was able to turn it into its own self-sustaining ecosystem. She cherishes the memory of the pool and the sense of discovery and self-education it lent her, but when they left that house, she never managed to return to the pool and see whether it has been maintained or destroyed. She describes the connection she felt to the pool as one of the "kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you" (46).
As the biologist and the surveyor venture deeper into the structure, the biologist is careful to verbalize her observations about its biological features only after the surveyor draws attention to them first, so as not to further raise the surveyor's suspicions. The writing on the wall, written in unclassifiable fruiting bodies, seems to be fresher and more recently grown the deeper they descend. They notice a viscous, shiny residue on the ground covering the stairs that tracks their bootprints. They also discover large, complex tracks that look to the biologist reminiscent of snails or trilobites. Then they notice a third set of bootprints, not from their own boots, that appears to indicate another human being recently ascended the stairs.
The biologist pauses her description of their descent in order to address the reader. She writes, "The eleventh expedition in particular had been difficult—and personally difficult for me with regard to a fact about which I have not been entirely honest thus far" (55). She goes on to admit that her husband was a member of the eleventh expedition, a fact she only withheld in the interest of appearing to be "a credible, objective witness" (55).
She then describes the additional strain that the eleventh expedition placed on their already disintegrating marriage. Her husband was a first responder and he joined the expedition as a medic. About a year after he left, the biologist heard someone rooting through her refrigerator in the middle of the night and found her amnesiac husband drinking milk straight from the carton. He seemed to remember her, but little else about the state of their marriage before he left. They had twenty-four hours together before the Southern Reach apprehended him and took him into their facility for questioning and tests. He died six months later of inoperable cancer, as did the rest of the explorers who returned.
Upon further descent, the biologist and the surveyor discover the mangled body of the anthropologist. It's clear that whatever killed the anthropologist is a creature unlike anything they've encountered before. The biologist suspects that whatever killed the anthropologist is the creature writing on the walls, and that perhaps the anthropologist interrupted it, causing it to kill her. The biologist suspects that the psychologist coerced the anthropologist into attempting to draw samples from the creature through hypnosis and then lied about it to maintain control of the party. The biologist tells the surveyor her theory, and tells her that she believes she is impervious to the psychologist's hypnosis. The surveyor resists this notion at first, but eventually yields to the possibility that she's being manipulated by the psychologist. Agreeing to press the psychologist on the circumstances of the anthropologist's death, they begin their ascent.
When they reach the mouth of the tower, the psychologist is gone without a trace. The surveyor resists the conclusion that her absence proves the psychologist's guilt. They return to base camp and find that the psychologist took half of their supplies and several of the guns and abandoned camp. The surveyor wants to go back to the border and await extraction, but the biologist insists on staying. She wants to return to the tower. They stay at base and run tests on the samples they collected. The biologist laments the fact that she neglected to sample the biomaterial of the walls. When she observes the sample that the anthropologist took under the microscope, it looks remarkably like human brain tissue. That night, the biologist and the surveyor take shifts standing watch. While the biologist stands watch, she notices a flash of light emanating from the lighthouse.
The storm over Area X reminds the biologist of the day she spent with her husband after he returned from his expedition. It was also raining then. She describes the beginning of their relationship and their inherent incompatibility. Her husband was exceptionally outgoing whereas she is an introvert. He always felt that he would be able to break through her private shell and gain access to a deeper, more private well of personality and secrets, but she always assured him that there is nothing more to her than what he sees. By the time he was preparing to leave for the expedition, they were constantly fighting. He told her once that she had pushed him so far away emotionally that it actually drove him to volunteer for the expedition.
When he returned, the biologist was unsettled by how much of his identity seemed to be missing. She had never known him to be melancholy or betray even the slightest sadness. She noticed strange, gaping holes in his knowledge, and he gazed at things in and around their house, as if trying to decipher what they once meant to him. After spending the day with him and determining that this person in her house is not her husband, but at that point a total stranger to her, she called the Southern Reach agency, and they promptly came and collected him. He didn't resist.
The following morning, the biologist feels her heightened senses have spread to her chest. She feels, internally, as if a prickly brightness is infecting her. She's sure that this is all a part of the biological effects of inhaling the burst spore in the tower. The surveyor refuses to join the biologist in the tower or the lighthouse. The biologist prefers to go to the lighthouse because she thinks the psychologist is holed up there. The surveyor thinks that even if the psychologist is up there, she could easily pick them off from her vantage point. The biologist attempts to use the psychologist's hypnotic incantation to force the surveyor along with her. The surveyor quickly shakes off the effects of the words and realizes what the biologist tried to do. She's thoroughly disgusted by the biologist's attempt to hypnotize her, but she tentatively agrees to wait at the base for the biologist to return.
Analysis
The title of this section, "Integration," refers, among other themes, to the process of the biologist becoming integrated into Area X; as a result of her inhaling the burst spores, her body undergoes rapid changes—the prickly brightness she experiences, the heightened senses and the brightness she feels emanating from her chest—which reflect the uncanny brightness and iridescence of the atmosphere in Area X. It's clear from the start of Annihilation that VanderMeer writes with a deep interest in portraying the sublime. The sublime as a philosophical concept was developed in the 18th century by Edmund Burke, and further explored Kant and Schopenhauer. It refers to that which cannot be calculated or conceptualized—something both beautiful and terrifying, and overwhelming for the human mind. Examples of sublime experiences might include standing being on a raft in the middle of the ocean or floating through outer space.
At several points in Integration, words seem to fail the biologist, suggesting a sublime experience. When she first reenters the tower with the surveyor, she realizes that the walls are actually breathing, and she says, "I think I was shaking as I finally stood. I don’t know if I can convey the enormity of that moment in words. The tower was a living creature of some sort. We were descending into an organism" (41). The theme of sublimity is further developed through the eyes of the biologist, especially with regard to the structure of the tower as they descend further into its pulsating walls. She says, "the depths [were] now revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in. But I tried, just as I had always tried, even from the very beginning of my career" (43). This simultaneous beauty and horror is a textbook example of the sublime at work. Area X itself seems to respond to this concept of the sublime in the writing that appears on the tower walls. An excerpt of the writing reads, "… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …" (61). Imagery involving "the abyss," incomprehensible in its scale and depth, and reference to the limits of human comprehension are all congruent with notions of the sublime.
This section further develops the theme of specialization. Upon observing the lattice structure of the script with which the tower communicates in writing, the biologist expresses her frustration: "I had the wrong brain for this task, and so did she; we needed a linguist. We could look at that latticework script for ages and the most original thought I would have is that it resembled the sharp branching of hard coral. To the surveyor, it might resemble the rough tributaries of a vast river" (49). By relating the structure of the script to each of their respective fields, VanderMeer demonstrates the perspectival differences in the way the scientists view the world. Specialization in Annihilation closely relates to other themes like subjectivity and inquiry, because the specific field of any given explorer will inevitably affect the way they interact with Area X and the way Area X interacts with them.
Part 02 introduces an important symbol and instance of parallelism from the biologist's childhood in the form of their backyard pool, which, left unmaintained, turned into a self-sustaining ecosystem over which the young biologist presided. In addition to serving as an obvious microcosmic parallel to what would be her later fascination with Area X, the biologist's recollection of the pool provides an opportunity for further characterization of her husband, a member of the eleventh expedition. When she tells her husband about her pool ecosystem, he says, "I would have sailed boats on it" (77), demonstrating his blatant instinct to interfere with what the biologist respected, even as a child, as a system that had nothing to do with her. The irony of that stance is inherent in the title of Section 02, "Integration." She's now becoming a part of the self-sustaining ecosystem that is Area X.
