Michael Crichton

The Price of Entertainment

Michael Crichton has written many bestsellers throughout his career. Many people like his books while at the same time there are many people out there who seem to find fault in everything he does. Crichton's novels are popular, but by no means perfect. Michael Crichton's novel, Jurassic Park, suffers from a lack of depth in its writing and creativeness due to Crichton's focus on keeping the reader entertained and providing an abundance of scientific information. Even though most people consider it a very good book, including me, if you stop and look you'll discover that just about all the book achieves, from a literary standpoint, is telling an interesting story (novelguide.com NA).

Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942 and was raised in Long Island (Chapman 67). With a B.A. in anthropology, Crichton was pursuing a career in medicine, which may have influenced his chosen genre. To help pay for college, he wrote books under many aliases. After the success of his book, The Andromeda Strain, he decided to give up medicine and become a full time writer. Over the years his best works have been in the science fiction genre. In 1990, after many successful books, Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, probably his best-known work to date (Chapman 67).

Published in 1990 and taking place in 1990, Jurassic Park is a story of "greed and technological experimentation gone awry" that mostly takes place on Isla Nublar off of Costa Rica where a genetics engineering company named InGen has found a way to recreate dinosaurs from DNA fragments found in prehistoric insects fossilized in amber (Chapman 68). The company created a few hundred dinosaurs and placed them on the island in hopes of creating a biological attraction that will make them millions. In an effort to increase their profits InGen decides to keep their staff to a minimum and rely mainly on computers and machines to do most of the work required to maintain the park, which eventually turns out to be a major factor in their undoing. InGen invites specialists from many different fields to come and evaluate the

unfinished park after they realize that they are under surveillance by the EPA and their investors start to worry. The specialists include a mathematician, who is convinced that the park will inevitably fail, a botanist, the company's layer, and a paleontologist, who is the unofficial main character. At first the trip to the island goes as planned, except for Hammond, the owner, inviting his grandchildren, but then the company's computer maintenance man decides to shutdown the security systems while he steals from them, and when he doesn't return, due to a series of unfortunate events, things begin to get progressively worse. From this point the story turns into a predictable horror movie, inevitable t-rex attack, people get separated, the bad guys get picked off one by one, and even a good person dies just for an unexpected twist. Some people say that the book begins its predictable path at about page 80, where they arrive on the island and it is officially confirmed that InGen is growing dinosaurs (Chapman 68-71). The POV (point of view) of Jurassic Park is 3rd person omniscient (Uhl NA). The story is told very straightforward and clear through many episodes that switch between the characters in order to clearly connect the events, show cause and effect relationships, and to build suspense to keep the reader interested. There are two main conflicts in Jurassic Park. The first and more obvious conflict is human against nature. This is shown best through Jurassic Park itself, humans playing god and creating extinct animals then attempting to control them. Human against nature is also shown as the people try to fend off and escape the dinosaurs after they escape their designated areas. The other main conflict is the good of the individual against the good of society. This conflict is shown through the fact that every time someone chooses their own interests above the good of others their situation is worsened, and vice versa, when someone puts the good of others above the good of themselves everyone benefits (Trembley 120-122).

One of the main themes in this book is, obviously, the dangers that genetic engineering poses and how loose restrictions o the industry can easily lead to its misuse, which also ties into another theme, our (humans) inability to control nature. This is demonstrated over and over again throughout the book. The first time this shows up is at the very beginning when the worker is being taken to the hospital, although the book doesn't say for sure that it is a genetically engineered dinosaur that attacks the worker, but if you know anything about the book then you should be able to put two and two together and figure out that the guy was mauled by a raptor. Soon after that you should be able to put two and two together once again and come to the conclusion that all is not well and some dinosaurs have escaped the island and are attacking the locals. This theme can also be related to just about every human versus nature conflict in the book. The part about loose restrictions leading to misuse is in the book too. The reason Jurassic Park is in Costa Rica is because their government didn't really have any restrictions on the industry, but if they wanted to set it up in the United States it would take far longer if it would be allowed to happen at all. Another major, and quite obvious, theme is the problems of relying too much on technology. This theme proves to be one of the protagonists' major problems seeing as how the park is almost completely run by technology (novelguide.com NA).With most action and science fiction stories a creative plot is usually more important than creativeness in other areas such as comparisons, deeper meanings, and characters. The same holds true for Jurassic Park. The characters in Jurassic Park "seem stereotypical, or two-dimensional entities created primarily for the purpose of enduring events" (Trembley 122). You have the all-around good antagonist, the beautiful blonde, the know- it- all professor and scientist, the money craving tycoon, the slob of a computer geek, the wiz kid, and even a lawyer that fears for his own skin. The characters are not only stereotypical, but also static by not going through any changes by the end of the book (Trembley 122-125). Grant, the primary protagonist, is a paleontologist who is invited to Jurassic Park because of his expertise on dinosaurs. "In the face of the crisis that occurs at the park, Grant is the perfect levelheaded, unbiased protagonist" (Uhl NA). Crichton uses Grant to tell a majority of the story and also uses him to give the readers most of the scientific information (Uhl NA). Dr. Sattler, Grant's graduate student, is a 24-year-old,