This blog is the second in a two-part blog on Annihilation, the novel by Jeff VanderMeer.
Read part 1 here for a synopsis of the novel.
One of the fascinating ideas explored by Annihilation is how tenuous our relationship to certainty is—even when relying on neutral tools, like maps. The map features heavily in the novel. It’s a source of comfort, of certainty, but also as a kind of talisman. The map is the mission.
When the narrator frequently flashes back to her training at the Southern Reach, she remembers studying the map. Training also included hours of study of the features of Area X—particularly the Lighthouse.
However, none of their training mentioned the mysterious Staircase, which they find almost immediately. Why isn’t it on the map—or mentioned by her trainers?
Mapping as an Act of Creation & Concealment
Later in the book, the biologist theorizes that the Lighthouse and the map aren’t really the expedition at all—they’re props designed to supplement her hypnosis and make the landscape familiar and knowable. That’s why the Lighthouse and the map were unconsciously the focus of their trip: they were concrete. Tangible.
Their existence implies that there’s something dark and unexplainable beneath Area X—some revelation that is too terrible and alien to voice.
This is key to atmospheric horror: unspoken, inevitable truth.
The narrator says of her map,
“For what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
The map—a tool that’s supposed to be trustworthy and neutral—betrays her. It’s misleading precisely because it serves an agenda: to conceal the Staircase and force the navigator to focus on the Lighthouse.
Like the map, even the narrator’s perception is questioned—her primary tool of exploration.
The story implies that everything the narrator has seen in Area X is edited by her hypnotic programming. Softened, as though coming to grips with what she actually sees would rend her mind in half. At one moment, the psychologist threatens to rip away the relative safety of her altered perception like a veil. It never happens—but the threat remains.
The inability to trust her orientation, to trust her observation, leaves the biologist literally and emotionally unmoored.
It leaves me the same way.