Summary
The biologist recalls a transitional environment she used to visit on her late-night walks when she was still married. She never liked living in cities and finds herself unsuited to them, but there was a vacant lot not far from their house that was a microcosm of the wilderness she missed so badly. Her husband would always ask her where she went when she left at night, and she refused to tell him because she wanted to keep the lot to herself, even if it wasn't something that would particularly interest him anyway. Thinking about the little ecosystem there got her through some long, boring days at her job, where she longed to get back in the field. She compares the anonymous vacant lot to Area X, and makes the observation that "if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn’t other things have already gotten through? (157)
At base camp, the biologist observes the samples she collected under her smaller microscope (her larger one was destroyed in the surveyor's rampage). What she finds is that some of the samples from plants and animals in Area X are composed of modified human cells. She believes that this proves that members of previous expeditions were being absorbed and reconstituted as plants and animals inside Area X and relates it back to the passage written on the tower wall: "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead …" (159-160).
The biologist finally reads her husband's notebook and finds that it's been addressed to her. She takes her readers through the broad strokes of the eleventh expedition as described by her husband while commenting on her impressions of the way he decided to communicate it to her. She says, "nothing about my husband's journal was expected" (160), and finds herself surprised at several junctures by his courage and consideration. He, like her, watched the majority of his expedition die off. He was the last one, as far as he could tell, remaining alive by the end of it.
Unlike the twelfth expedition, the surveyor of the eleventh expedition decided to map the rest of Area X before descending into the tower, which everyone else refers to as "the tunnel." Her husband comments that none of them were too eager to explore the tunnel anyways because it frightened them. In the end, the group split into pairs, and her husband ended up with the surveyor. They explored the land northward and traveled as much as twenty miles a day without encountering a border. They started to suspect that Area X stretches much further than the Southern Reach was letting on.
When they turned around to check on the others, they went to the lighthouse and found carnage. The other explorers were either attacked by something they couldn't describe or turned on each other. At base camp, the body of the biologist was left stabbed to death with a note by the linguist, telling them he returned to the tunnel and not to follow him. From the base, the surveyor and the biologist's husband saw doppelgangers of every member of their expedition including themselves enter the tunnel at dusk. At first, they thought that they were dead and haunting Area X as ghosts, but they quickly abandon the theory. The surveyor decides to return to the border and attempt extraction, and the biologist's husband repairs a boat he found in the town and pushes off into the water to attempt to make landfall beyond the reach of Area X.
Even though it is past nightfall, after reading her husband's journal, the biologist sets out towards the tower. She can't resist the urge to go. She finds, stepping outside, that she doesn't even need a flashlight because the luminescence from her body is so strong. When she descends into the tower, she finds the anthropologist is still there, now being overrun from the underside by fruiting bodies. The biologist can't tell whether they were feeding on her, preserving her, or transforming her. She wonders if they have anything to do with what the surveyor said about being visited by a reanimated version of the anthropologist.
As she descends further, the heartbeat of the tower becomes increasingly powerful and shakes the structure, threatening to throw the biologist off balance. She stays close to the living walls to avoid the organisms teeming over the floor. Deep into the tower, she encounters new words on the wall; these words are "so freshly formed that they appeared to drip, and those that did manifest formed closed fists, as if not yet quite awake and alive" (171-172). The words read: "That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing... " (172). She descends another flight of stairs and faces a glowing gold light that she thinks must be the Crawler, and she continues towards it.
Before continuing with her narrative of finally facing the Crawler, the biologist recalls a particularly restless night in Rock Bay, the remote town where she was sent on a fellowship for two years. She drove, drunk, to the beach, climbed up on the rocks, and inspected her beloved tidal pools to see if she could glean anything new about them in the darkness of night. When she looked down into the water, she saw a giant, rare classification of starfish known by people in her field as a "destroyer-of-worlds." The sight so stunned her that when she looked up from it, she felt dislocated, as if she couldn't tell the seaward horizon from the way back to her truck.
She relates the feeling to a minor version of the feeling she has when she faces the Crawler. Down in the room with it, she feels strangled by its presence. It is as if the light from the Crawler fills the space like water, and she feels the sensation of drowning. Its form isn't defined; rather it's a rapidly changing reflection of her own perception of it. She feels as if the Crawler has access to her mind, and is able to change its perceived form based on her own expectations. When she finally opens her mouth, she feels the viscous light flow into her. She cannot breathe, she cannot move. The Crawler atomizes her form and reassembles her from the pieces. The experience is agony and feels separate from time. Once it is over, she feels as if she's been accepted, in a way, by the Crawler, or that it has destroyed her and rebuilt her in its own image. She is able to leave the tower without the Crawler paying her further attention.
The novel ends with a scene, in "realtime," as the biologist is preparing her legacy in the top of the lighthouse. The entire narrative has been recorded from there, edited and pieced together so as to be understood by future explorers. She binds the notebook together with another notebook full of her observations and figures, as well as her husband's notebook, and leaves them in the midden. She says that she plans to follow her husband's course up the coast. She doesn't expect to find him there, but she wants to see what he saw. The biologist ends her account simply and declaratively: "I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions. / I am not returning home" (196).
Analysis
The final section, "Dissolution," owes some of its clarity to the biologist's discovery of her husband's journal. Whatever "answers" at which the biologist begins to arrive are owed to the accounts of previous expeditions, and since her husband's journal was addressed to her and specifically meant for her consumption, it contains a lot of usable information. However, the most telling account from his journal recalls the appearance of doppelgangers of every member of the eleventh expedition, including himself and the surveyor, who were still alive and holed up at base camp.
Although it goes unsaid, the biologist's husband's account of his final destination after leaving his journal in the midden suggests that it couldn't have been him that returned home all those months ago, that it must have been the imitation of him created by Area X that the biologist took in, ate dinner with, made love to. This idea harks to one of the biologist's more haunting suggestions about Area X: "We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn’t other things have already gotten through?" (157)
Her observation mirrors her husband's suspicion of borders and underscores Southern Reach's palpable loss of control over Area X, which becomes increasingly apparent over the course of the novel. Clearly the organisms in Area X carry with them a type of infection growth, a "fruiting body," that can spread in the air and by touch, quite like a virus. If these doppelgangers managed to breach the border to the outside world and return to their respective homes, then there's no telling what other incognito organisms have already been loosed into the world, totally untraceable. Perhaps a mosquito or a toad, its cells inexplicably altered by Area X, wandered across the border and have spread their DNA around the globe. The idea that Area X's concrete, definable borders are encroaching on the rest of the world seems like a minor concern compared to the possibility that the concrete border really doesn't matter, because the border is actually quite porous to begin with.
The biologist introduces yet another microcosmic transitional environment with which to compare Area X: a vacant lot near her home that she used to visit on long evening walks alone. The transitionality of the lot stems from its location in a city. The biologist explains that she has never enjoyed city life. She writes, "The 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 … none of these things appealed to me" (155). The "unending wakefulness" of cities stands out as a reason why she detests them, because it points to the way cities resist natural cycles. They don't submit to the rhythms of the sun and the seasons. The animals on the lot reflect the unnaturalness of cities in their behavior. She writes, "Nighthawks gathered nearby to feast off the insects bombarding the streetlamps. Mice and owls played out ancient rituals of predator and prey. They all had a watchfulness about them that was different from animals in true wilderness; this was a jaded watchfulness, the result of a long and weary history. Tales of bad-faith encounters in human-occupied territory, tragic past events" (156). The way that animals instincts and behavior fundamentally change mirrors the way Area X alters the DNA of the life that inhabits it.
The transitional environment in the vacant lot also represents another phase in the biologist's evolution of how she interacts with the environments she studies. Beginning with the swimming pool over which she lorded as a child, continuing with the tidal pools she studied for two years of her life, and on to the vacant lot and finally to Area X, the way the biologist interacts with these environments defies objectivity. Her interaction with these environments is at times paradoxical, because while she becomes totally consumed by them and feels like she is an inextricable part of them, her attitude also emphasizes her estrangement from them and the rest of the world. She is forever relegated to the status of observer. Of her time with the fellowship, she writes, "I was the queen of the tidal pools, and what I said was the law, and what I reported was what I had wanted to report. I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me" (173). This self-evaluation is rather prescient, because ultimately she literally becomes a part of Area X; Area X alters her genetics and imprints on her DNA.
