Annihilation

At the beginning of Chapter 5, the narrator says, “I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity” (155). She then lists many qualities of cities that did not agree with her: “[t]he dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction” (157). Instead, the narrator presents herself as most at home in the pure air and solitude of natural habitats. Growing up, for example, she escapes the problems of her parents by studying the ecosystem that develops in the family’s backyard pool. During a research grant, she wanders out into tidepools by herself to study a starfish, ignoring the eyes and opinions of the locals in the village. Even in Area X, the narrator prefers the problems posed by the organisms she studies to the complications that arise through her relations with other humans. Though this penchant for solitude causes problems in her marriage, it serves her well in Area X, where both the surveyor and the psychologist note that she is adapting so well that she seems to be favoring the new environment to her old one.