Summary
"Immolation" begins where "Integration" left off, with the biologist beginning her solitary journey towards the lighthouse. In walking through the landscape of Area X, the symptoms from inhaling the spore intensify; she describes the feeling as being "as if I traveled through the landscape with the sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears" (89). As she walks, the biologist works through her tentative theories of what forces are at work in Area X. She thinks perhaps the "Crawler," the name she's assigned to whatever agent is writing on the tower walls, works on behalf of the tower organism, and that the words it writes are simply a biological function of fertilization or reproduction. She's hoping that the content of the words doesn't matter and that the crawler is simply absorbing them through materials left behind by past explorers and using them for fodder; the alternative strikes the biologist as a scarier possibility, that the Crawler or the tower or both have free will and interpretive capabilities. The physical sensation of energy and intense sensory heightening invigorates the biologist, but at the same time, she doesn't trust it.
The biologist recalls reports from the first expedition into Area X. Area X itself had only been a phenomenon for thirty years. The inhabitants of the town there were mostly descendants of fishermen, and their disappearance wasn't given much attention in the media. The biologist describes public knowledge of Area X as limited and mostly observed by conspiracy theorists who were largely written off by the mainstream. Reports from the first expedition were relatively uneventful compared to more recent ones, and although the level of destruction and degradation of the man-made structures appeared to reflect a far longer period of condemnation than what it had undergone, nobody seemed to have noticed.
Closing in on the lighthouse, the biologist stumbles upon the remains of the fishing town that once stood in the center of Area X. She discovers dilapidated homes and homes sunken into the creek. The structures have been taken over by the ecosystem. It appears the lichen has mimicked the form of human beings living in their homes, almost like the shadows cast of humans incinerated by nuclear explosions. Standing and sitting around the condemned homes are human-like forms, grown out of lichen and moss. The biologist is further unsettled by dolphins she sees swimming in the freshwater stream; when one breaches the surface of the water, she observes that it has very human eyes.
When the biologist reaches the lighthouse, she finds signs of human inhabitance. The lighthouse is surrounded and outfitted with makeshift defenses to keep people out. There are walls dug deep into the ground facing the sea, ribbed along the top for the barrels of rifles to peek over it. There are shards of glass glued to the side of the lighthouse to prevent anyone from climbing it, and rings of rusted barbed wire underneath the windows.
Inside the lighthouse, the rooms and stairwells are filled with evidence of violence. Bullet holes riddle walls and overturned tables. Thick trails of blood cover the floors. In other places, dark spots suggest huge pools of dried blood. There are marks of blood spatter on the walls. Each suggests a different kind of violence, anything between disembowelment, stabbing, and gunshot wounds. In one room, the biologist finds a framed photograph of a middle-aged man with a young girl standing before the lighthouse. She assumes he once was the lighthouse keeper and takes the photo out of the frame and pockets it.
When the biologist reaches the top of the lighthouse, she has the strong sense that it's been recently inhabited. She smells fresh sweat over the usual aged must. She sees the psychologist's gear in the top of the lighthouse, but no sign of the psychologist. When she looks out the window, she can see the entire landscape of Area X stretched out before her. A phosphorescent aura surrounds the tower, and she's convinced that no one before her could sense it, or at least no one who hadn't inhaled the burst spores. Then she finds a trap door in the floor of the room, opens it, and sees an enormous mound of Southern Reach-issued notebooks—like the one she's writing this account in. They are each marked by job title, presumably written by members of previous expeditions, and they are each full. She says that there are far more journals in there than could possibly have been filled by twelve expeditions.
The biologist recounts a fellowship she took while in school that sent her to a remote fishing town on the west coast for two years to study a type of mussel that only appeared in this specific location. She describes the people of the town as "laconic," and in many ways, she seems to fit in quite well with her surroundings there (106). She feels perhaps estranged by the sense that she's known as "the biologist," a strange presence that stalks the rocky shores studying shellfish. She occasionally sleeps with someone in town who she meets at the bar, but doesn't form any lasting relationships or even minor friendships. She's fascinated though by the ecosystem there, and dreads leaving it. She enjoys the solitude the town affords her.
She then transitions from describing the town to describing her relationship with her husband, which was often strained because of their very different personalities, particularly their social instincts. He often called her "ghost bird," referring to the sense of distance he felt between them. They would go out with his friends from the hospital, and he would fault her for seeming distant, "taciturn," coming off as anti-social or unentertained. She explains that she actually does enjoy bars, because they are a type of ecosystem unto themselves, but she simply doesn't express contentment the way he did. Upon discovering the pile of journals, she's afraid her husband's is among them. She describes the journals as "flimsy gravestones," and explains that what her husband wanted most was to stand out as an individual, but that by joining the expedition and having his account thrown into a pile of journals, he couldn't possibly stand out (110).
The biologist reads through the journals obsessively. At first, she reads them cover to cover, but realizing that she doesn't have time to continue doing that, starts to skim. Some accounts are fairly standard and align with others, while some are razor-focused on minute, uncanny details. One particularly hypnotic journal observed a specific type of thistle that grew in Area X and the micro-ecosystem which constituted it. The biologist writes, of this journal, "In no instance did the observer stray more than a foot or two from a particular plant, and at no point, either, did the observer pull back to provide a glimpse of base camp or their own life. After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror" (114).
The biologist climbs to the top of the pile and quickly discovers the journals from the eleventh expedition. She finds her husband's, but can't bring herself to read it immediately. She also finds evidence in various journals referencing the passages on the tower wall, though it's unclear whether the words appeared in a journal or on the tower wall first. When the biologist emerges from the midden, she sees the psychologist's boot sticking out of the sand at the base of the lighthouse.
Analysis
The title of the section, "Immolation," immediately conjures the concept of sacrifice, which by the end of the section emerges as an important theme of the section and the novel as a whole. The mound of journals the biologist finds in the "midden" take on the quality of a mass grave. The biologist describes the journals as "flimsy gravestones" (110), the word flimsy referring of course to the quality of the notebooks, but also taking on a figurative meaning, commenting on their limited ability to actually memorialize the previous explorers. The fact that they're rotting in this dark room beneath a trapdoor in the lighthouse testifies to the futility of their individual accounts. The only people who might read these accounts are those who are also likely doomed to a similar fate.
Specifically with regard to her husband, the biologist recognizes the tragedy of how their accounts and individual experiences of Area X are essentially homogenized, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the sense that when they appear in this massive pile of accounts of failed or aborted expeditions, the individual identities of each account are blurred by the overarching futility of trying to solve what is causing the phenomenon in Area X to occur and persist. Literally in the sense that the journals towards the bottom of the pile are pulpifying and becoming part of the landscape of the room, as a corpse decomposes in soil and becomes nutrients for plant life. The biologist mourns her husband's desire to stand out, writing, "Yet even as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that he wanted to stand out. Seeing that huge pile of journals, this was another thing I thought of: That he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality. That here were the indiscriminate accounts of so many souls, and that his account couldn’t possibly stand out. That, in the end, he’d been reduced to a state that approximated my own" (110).
This chapter further explores the differences between the biologist and her husband, personality-wise, through the biologist's account of a project she undertook while in school. The fellowship sent her to a remote fishing town on the west coast, where she was dazzled by the unpolluted ecosystem. She describes the people in the town as "laconic" and her feelings of estrangement from being an outsider of the town, "the biologist" who lives there for two years without developing any relationships. Even though she characterizes the town itself as guarded and reserved, she is a level further removed from the culture by assuming a role of strict observation. Her role in the town results in a two-way inquiry that parallels the two-way inquiry occurring in Area X. The biologist observes the ecological phenomena in the town as the town, in turn, observes and draws conclusions about her. Mimicking the way she thought the townspeople thought of her, she writes, "Oh, that’s just the old biologist. She’s been here for ages, going crazy studying those mussels. She talks to herself, mutters to herself at the bar, and if you say a kind word …" (108).
She then relates that feeling of being observed and claimed by those observations to the pile of journals, writing, "When I saw those hundreds of journals, I felt for a long moment that I had become that old biologist after all. That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality" (108). While all these accounts were being taken down about Area X in an effort to draw some conclusion about it that could be taken back to the Southern Reach and used to control or stop the spread of whatever seemingly extra-terrestrial force drives the ecosystem, the explorers were, themselves, being overtaken by Area X, "colonized," as the biologist puts it. And in the end, all of their accounts were warped and deposited in the midden to eventually decay and literally become part of Area X.
In "Immolation," the biologist explicates the lighthouse as a symbol: "The lighthouse had drawn expedition members like the ships it had once sought to bring to safety through the narrows and reefs offshore. I could only underscore my previous speculation that to most of them a lighthouse was a symbol, a reassurance of the old order, and by its prominence on the horizon it provided an illusion of a safe refuge" (115-116). The irony of the lighthouse is that instead of drawing a ship to shore and safety, as lighthouses are designed to do, they drew explorers further into Area X, from inland to the shore, to the furthest landed point away from the border between it and the rest of the world. The lighthouse, like so many of the senses described by the biologist, seems to be a sinister manipulation, a lie told to the explorers by Area X. It draws them in and then swallows up their whole impression of it, digesting the journals to eventually become incomprehensible sludge.
