We Are the Ants

“When you break down the things we do every day to their component pieces, you begin to understand how ridiculous they are.”

Henry has an existential and pessimistic view of the world around him. The novel's title implies that humans’ lives are routinized and insignificant, just as humans believe an ant’s life is routinized and insignificant. This quote highlights the importance of this concept and the novel’s title, proposing that nothing we do matters, an especially important idea given the high stakes (or low, if one believes that human life is meaningless) of Henry’s opportunity to choose worldwide destruction.

“That’s what I assume they’re doing. Trying to fathom the motives of an advanced alien race who possess the technological capacity to travel through the universe is like the frog I dissected in ninth grade trying to understand why I cut it open and pinned its guts to the table. The sluggers could be blasting me with deadly radiation or stuffing me full of slugger eggs just to see what happens. Hell, I could be some slugger kid’s science fair project.”

This quote juxtaposes humankind with extraterrestrial life. The comparison in this quote helps Henry and, by extension Hutchinson marvel at the superiority of other potential life forms in the universe, thus highlighting the relative weaknesses of human beings. This quote calls into question human notions of ultimate superiority and proposes that there may be life forms that are so much more advanced than us that one of their kids could make a school project out of us. This quote incorporates humor to express this poignant message. This quote also incorporates irony because while humans believe that they can dissect other living objects for study, they can also be dissected as subjects for study.