51 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonThe Lost World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5, Chapter 1 Summary: “Baby”
Sarah, with her experience in animal field hospitals, understands Eddie’s reasoning for helping the baby T. Rex. With its broken leg untreated, it would be easy prey. With Malcolm’s help, they sedate the dinosaur and prepare a cast from a polymer resin that will expand as the baby grows. The procedure is tricky, and Malcolm suggests that the others leave; he fears the dinosaur’s parents might come looking. The rest head out to the high hide.
Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary: “High Hide”
The others join Levine up in the shelter. They watch as a prowling pack of raptors attack a triceratops. The triceratops fends off the raptors.
Part 5, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Herd”
Night is falling. Dodgson’s henchman heads to the dock to rendezvous with the boat. Suddenly the road ahead is blocked by a herd of dinosaurs. Another herd blocks him from the back. They refuse to move, and stare at the Jeep. Determined to get to the dock, he gets out of the vehicle and starts to run in what he thinks is the right direction. The dinosaurs charge him, and he loses direction, heading into the jungle. He comes out on a long sweeping plain, the same plain that stretches below the high hide. As Levine watches from a distance, the roving pack of raptors descends on him. Levine, uncertain who the man is, is fascinated by the raptors’ method of attack: a furious and brutal feeding.
Part 5, Chapter 4 Summary: “Dodgson”
Dodgson wakes, uncertain where he is (the tyrannosaur nest). He is groggy but he knows he must get to the dock. He is stunned—and disgusted—when he notices several tiny dinosaurs nibbling at his fingers. He jumps out and heads out. He runs until he finds a kind of shed. He goes in, lays down on the concrete, and quickly falls asleep.
Part 5, Chapter 5 Summary: “Trailer”
As they work on the baby T. Rex, Malcolm and Sarah discuss an oddity that they have both noticed about the island: there are very few adult dinosaurs. Suddenly the trailer’s motion-sensitive alarms go off. Something is moving outside the trailer. They see a head of a T. Rex fill the trailer’s window. Another appears on the opposite side. For an anguishing moment, the two creatures stare into the trailer. Did they track the baby? Malcolm doubts it. But Sarah understands they are looking for the baby. Trying to be calm, she slowly moves to the trailer door and offers the still-sedated baby to the mother. The mother smashes the door’s window and Sarah quickly drops the baby and heads back in. The two creatures gently carry the baby away from the trailer and carefully lick it, trying to revive it.
Infuriated, the two animals start to bellow. They return to the trailer and begin to move the trailer one step at a time toward the nearby cliff. Sarah and Malcolm are bloodied and disoriented. Malcolm hurts his leg. They both feel the trailer slide over the cliff edge and realize only the connector to the other trailer is keeping them from dropping. Malcolm tells Sarah to push the button for the back-up generator on the instrument panel to get the lights back on. Sarah struggles to get to the panel. When she pulls herself up to the panel, she floods the trailer with light, startling the dinosaurs who flee.
Part 5, Chapter 6 Summary: “Thorne”
From the high hide, Thorne sees the trailer and volunteers to help them. He jumps into the Explorer but does not get far before the car dies. He sees taillights ahead and runs to find Dodgson’s Jeep where it went off the road. The keys are still in it, and Thorne roars off for the trailers. When he approaches the trailers, the T. Rexes turn to him and charge the car, but they stop at the tree where they had put their baby revealing that they were acting to protect their offspring.
Thorne works fast. The trailer is sliding slowly over the edge. He hooks the trailer using the wench in the Jeep and secures it to a tree. But he knows that cannot hold very long.
Part 5, Chapter 7 Summary: “Trailer”
Climbing up from the suspended trailer, Sarah struggles to help Malcolm make the tricky ascent. His legs are useless, and Sarah must carry him. She leaves him to get to the door; she knows she needs a rope to leverage Malcolm. At the door, she meets Thorne. Together they fashion a rope sling and haul Malcolm up and out. Feeling the trailer start to slide, Sarah reaches down and pulls Malcolm to safety by his hair. No sooner are the two clear then trailer snaps the connection and drops over the edge.
Part 5, Chapter 8 Summary: “The High Hide”
In the high hide, Arby notes an approaching pack of raptors. Levine assures them they are 20 feet up and quite safe. Back at the trailer, Sarah and Thorne address Malcolm’s leg wound. They know it will have to be cleaned.
Part 5, Chapter 9 Summary: “Malcolm”
Sarah sedates Malcolm with morphine. As the two work to clean the leg wound, Malcolm rambles on about the process of evolution and the risks of extinction and how a species (not its environment) determines their own path to extinction.
Part 5, Chapter 10 Summary: High Hide
Levine is perplexed and anxious. The pack of raptors prowling about the base of the tower appears to be studying its structure. They begin to leap, snarling and hissing. Each leap goes a bit higher and other raptors begin to test the legs of the structure for climbing. In quick order, they begin to reach the shelter. Eddie grabs a crowbar and swings at the creatures and tells the rest to climb up to the roof. Eddie’s shirttail gets snarled in the claws of one of the raptors, and he is pulled over the top and falls to the ground. The raptors pounce on him.
Arby is frozen and refuses to try to climb to the roof. He loses his balance and falls to the ground. The others fear he is a goner, but he quickly climbs into the predator cage at the base of the high hide. The sturdy cage withstands the raptors’ vicious attacks, but then the raptors drag the cage away with them with Arby still inside.
Sarah and Thorne arrive at the high hide (Sarah on the motorbike, Thorne in the Jeep). They give chase to the disappearing pack of raptors. Kelly rides with Sarah, who shoves a gun in Kelly’s hands and tells her to take a shot at raptor if she can. They cannot afford to let the raptors out of their sight—they have no idea where their nest is or where they might be taking the helpless Arby.
Part 5 Analysis
The Fifth Configuration is dominated by action, most notably the tyrannosaurs’ calculated retaliatory attack on the trailer and the raptors’ strategic assault on the team’s observation tower. Both attacks place the team in positions of helplessness in places they thought were safe. Additionally, both attacks reveal dinosaurs’ ability to coordinate and communicate around a common goal. dinosaurs are far cleverer—and far more dangerous—than the team suspected.
Amid this action are two critical events that bring into focus the novel’s thematic interest in the dynamics of extinction and in the complexity of nature, which both Levine’s and Dodgson’s teams tend to simplify.
Ian Malcolm, as the team’s self-appointed philosopher, has driven the novel’s action through his ironic commentary on the implications of Site B. His theory—that a species elects its own extinction—diminishes all the action into the theoretical, that ivory tower world that Dr. Thorne so disparages. Something has to be done to cripple Malcolm and his self-anointed position as the team’s scientist/philosopher. The attack on the trailer by the tyrannosaur parents reduces Malcolm to helplessness. It does not follow Malcolm’s elegant chaos-based theories because the tyrannosaurs are raging against extinction and choosing to fight back.
As the trailers tumble about under the tyrannosaurs’ attack, Malcolm is wounded and helpless. It is only the through the efforts of the teams’ two pragmatic scientists—the animal behaviorist Sarah Harding and the problem-solving civil engineer Jack Thorne—that Malcolm is rescued. As Sarah and Thorne work to clean the nasty leg wound, Malcolm, now under the influence of a massive shot of morphine, continues to prattle on about the theory of extinction. The tidiness of his philosophical template contrasts to the messy chaos all about the trailer. The novel affirms that the future belongs to those grounded in the now, aware of their moment with immediacy and resourcefulness and able to engage events in real-time.
The other defining event in this Configuration is the death of Eddie Carr. He is an affable type, happily immersed in a world where when machines breakdown they get fixed, where problems come with solutions, where ends inevitably get tied up. His decision to save the wounded baby T. Rex is motivated by compassion but also by his pragmatic worldview. The wounded dinosaur is a problem with a clear and immediate solution.
Yet, given the novel’s implicit argument that nature is complex, amoral, and irreducible, Eddie, for all his compassion and his savvy pragmatism, winds up viciously torn apart by a pack of raptors because his shirt tail gets snagged on the tower’s railing. Eddie sees a world that makes sense, that can be adjusted and fixed. His death is gruesome, yes, but symbolically it suggests the very messy fragmented world he wants so desperately (and so arrogantly) to control, direct, and repair. In addition, it is Eddie’s decision to solve the problem of the baby T. Rex that is directly responsible for the attack on the trailer. The parents want the offspring back. Eddie’s logic is exposed as reckless and dangerous.
Thus, the Fifth Configuration ends in chaos. Compassion creates anger, helping causes pain, logic collapses into irony. A caged Arby is under the control of the angry raptors, and the team is in hot pursuit as they realize Site B is not the orderly world they presumed.
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By Michael Crichton
