“We Did Not Trust Ourselves” : A study of the unreliable narration in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Abstract: Annihilation is the first novel in the trilogy named “The Southern Reach,” a ScienceFiction/Horror series of books written by Jeff VanderMeer. Annihilation focuses on a team of scientists on an expedition into an area where the very nature has been altered in mysterious ways. The scientists’ goal is to study this area to come to an understanding of what is happening, but like the eleven previous expeditions, they fail.   With the aid of narratology, I will argue that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is an unreliable narrative. To prove that, I will analyse and discuss specific passage’s unreliable narration used in the novel, as well as incorporating themes from the novel that directly correlate with the unreliability of the novel’s narrative.  Annihilation is filled with ambiguous language and events that are on almost every  level unexplainable using scientific methods. The way that the novel is written makes the narrator, the biologist, unreliable in her narration of the events that take place around her. She is tormented by both her past and by the beings that inhabit Area X, such as the Crawler. The results of this study exemplify the ambiguity of VanderMeer’s writing and how he uses this ambiguous language to further thrust the narrative into a void of chaotic unreliability. There is nothing in the novel that can be trusted as fact in the context of the world in which the characters inhabit, down to the characters own thoughts and memories. The presented themes of Annihilation are in direct correlation with the unreliability of the narrative and show how deep VanderMeer went into constructing the most unreliable narrative possible.