Galapagos

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapters 1-12

Book 1, Chapters 13-25

Book 1, Chapters 26-38

Book 2, Chapters 1-7

Book 2, Chapters 8-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Nature Versus Nurture

Galapagos explores Nature Versus Nurture as it explores ideas about evolution, charting the development of humanity across a million years. From Leon’s perspective, the novel shows how the species evolves from the familiar, depressing time of the end of the 20th century to a time a million years later, when humanity is a fur-covered, semiaquatic mammal. In presenting this development, Leon seeks to ask whether nature or nurture is more important. In other words, he tries to determine whether people are genetically predisposed to act in a certain manner—or whether their characters and behaviors are a product of their environment. The nature argument suggests that people are simply born a certain way and are unlikely to change, while the nurture argument suggests that people are shaped by the environment in which they’re raised.

A key character in Leon’s investigation into nature versus nurture is James Wait. Leon can look into the characters’ pasts and, when he looks into Wait’s, sees a tragic upbringing. Wait is the product of an incestuous relationship, so many people in society view him as the immoral result of inbreeding. His genetic history, in society’s view, is abnormal, suggesting that some degree of immorality is encoded in his DNA. However, Wait endures an abusive childhood and is beaten and exploited while young. While a teenager, he’s put to work as a gay prostitute and learns how to scam people into giving him money. In this situation, he kills a client who asks to be strangled (though he doesn’t ask to be killed). As a result, Wait’s criminality is attributable to either nature or nurture arguments. Leon explores Wait’s past thoroughly because his character is at the crux of this argument. Wait’s crimes in later life either result from genetics, suggesting that he was broken from the very beginning, or from the abusive nature of his environment, which nurtured him to be a criminal. Gradually, nurture emerges as a more reasonable explanation, according to Leon. Despite Wait’s apparent genetic issues, he’s capable of moments of tenderness. For example, Mary sees Wait feeding the orphans and decides that he must be a good person. She doesn’t see his genetics, only his actions. When Wait’s environment changes, the perception of him changes, and his genetic nature becomes irrelevant.

Like Wait, the people who survive on the island are each, to some degree, broken. The orphans are alienated by language and culture. Hisako lives with radiation poisoning and therefore gives birth to a fur-covered baby. Selena is hereditarily blind, Mary is suicidal, and Adolf is a fool who may be genetically predisposed to developing Huntington’s disease. Each of these characters has a flaw that they could pass along to the next generation, either through their genes or their upbringing. Both nature and nurture present a threat to humanity, but the circumstances of life on the island show that nurture is more important. Leon observes how the island and the ensuing years shape the descendants of these people, shaving off the rough edges and gradually eliminating the genetic problems until humans are much happier. The debate about nature versus nurture itself becomes irrelevant when evolution dominates and takes over, giving humans less petty things to worry about.

Pacifism

Leon describes the speed at which war breaks out across the world. After the financial collapse, humans are desperate. This desperation quickly translates into military action, as the big-brained humans can’t think of any other way to resolve their dispute. While some people plan to take a luxury cruise to the Galapagos Islands, others starve to death. Leon criticizes the humans and their big brains; having observing humanity for a million years has given Leon much perspective, and he comes to see war as an absurd creation of humankind. From his criticism emerges another theme: Pacifism. Leon describes how humans quickly turn to savage, brutal, violent, and random acts of war to mediate disputes they don’t understand, thereby creating more disputes and never settling anything. For example, the Peruvian Air Force launches an attack on Ecuador to take back the Galapagos Islands. They destroy a hospital, an airport, and a Columbian ship that they believe to be the Bahia de Darwin. They achieve none of their goals, kill many people, and don’t even hit the right targets. Furthermore, their intended attack on the Bahia de Darwin threatens to completely end humanity, preventing the survivors from escaping to the island. The military men thus nearly destroy humanity’s only hope for survival. Pacifism emerges as a necessity because the unfair, brutal, and random acts of violence that humans inflict on each other threaten their survival.

Leon’s own experiences in Vietnam left him with a yearning for pacifism and a desperate desire to see hope in humanity. Leon was raised by a helpless, foolish father who drove his mother to leave them. Leon hated his father and, as a young man, enlisted in the Marines. When he was sent to Vietnam, he experienced the brutality of war firsthand. After contracting syphilis in Vietnam and visiting a doctor in Thailand, Leon felt numb and hollow because of war. His numbness to the travails of society and to his own health showed him the burning need for pacifism as a moral choice. The world seemed helplessly swept up in continuous acts of desperate, violent war—and Leon saw no way to escape. The same doctor who treated him, however, also recognized Leon’s name, being a big fan of the books written by Leon’s father—and was the only person Leon ever met who liked the books. The doctor showed Leon that even someone as terrible as his father can have someone who believes in them. Leon, who was part of a brutal imperial war and who witnessed and took part in war crimes, needs to believe in this kind of salvation—not just for himself but for his species. The need for pacifism is a yearning for humanity to change, to evolve not in a physical sense but in a moral sense. If someone can believe in Kilgore Trout, Leon realizes, then pacifism is an achievable goal to redeem humanity.

Leon describes how humanity, once its brains are smaller, isn’t necessarily nonviolent. In the future, the species is unrecognizable as humans, but pacifism emerges as the natural state of the world. These evolved humans lack the capacity to make war and destroy the planet like before. Violence still exists but not in the premeditated, brutal manner of the 20th century. For example, the sharks that eat Mary and Adolf aren’t pacifists. They fill an essential niche in the ecosystem, and their violence is unthinking and natural. The sharks transcend pacifism because they’re separate from morality and intent. They kill because they’re evolutionarily engineered to do so. Killing is a natural act rather than the unnatural kind of war that humans waged in the past. Only by evolving beyond the capacity for war can humanity achieve true pacifism.

Regret

The events of Galapagos take place over a million years. This huge span of time gives a great deal of opportunity for regret to amass and fester, particularly in the mind of the narrator, Leon, a former marine who was sent to Vietnam after seeking to escape his abusive father, Kilgore Trout. In Vietnam, Leon takes part in events he seriously regrets. An elderly woman kills an American soldier, a friend of Leon’s, so he kills her in revenge. Leon regrets killing the woman on a personal level, and he regrets taking part in a war that he comes to see as pointless, imperialistic, and vicious. Leon’s regret sends him on a journey of self-discovery as he seeks atonement. Upon consulting a doctor in Thailand, he’s advised to travel to Sweden to seek political asylum after abandoning the US military. Leon goes to a shipyard in Sweden and works on the construction of the Bahia de Darwin. At this shipyard, Leon dies in a random accident. At the time of his death, Leon is still filled with regret. The heavy weight of his regret prevents him from joining his father in the afterlife. Desperate to resolve this feeling, he decides to stay with the ship as a ghost. Leon’s regret ties him to the ship and turns him into the story’s narrator, the observer of a million years of human evolution.

Leon’s festering regret makes him more sympathetic toward the people he observes. Leon’s powers as a ghost allow him to glimpse characters’ pasts and their motivations. Even though many of these characters are terrible people, Leon can empathize with how their regrets, either spoken or unspoken, haunt them. Mary is regretful to the point that she has suicidal thoughts following the death of her husband. Wait continues to commit crimes but carries emotional pain he can’t overcome as the result of his abusive childhood and an incident in which he unwittingly killed a man. Zenji and Hisako regret listening to Andrew, who in turn regrets that he can’t take advantage of the end of the world. Leon obsesses over these characters because he sees them as fellow travelers. They’re equally obsessed by the kind of regret that defined and shaped his life. Leon must stay with them—even when he has the chance to go to the afterlife—because he wants to vicariously deal with his own regret through them.

At the end of the novel, Leon is ready to leave the world. He has been a ghost for a million years and has finally reached the point that he’s willing to leave his regret behind. His father, Kilgore, once told him that he’d regret remaining with the island and its inhabitants, but Leon has discovered that, for the first time, he feels no regret. He’s glad that he stayed and saw how humanity evolved beyond the capacity to destroy itself. The same issues that caused so much regret during his lifetime and during the first voyage of the Bahia de Darwin are now gone. No cause for regret exists anymore, and Leon has accepted and dealt with his own regret. He has proven his father wrong once again. This time, Leon goes to the afterlife willingly because he no longer has anything to feel regretful about. He’s free now that humanity has evolved past the point that it’s even capable of feeling or understanding an emotion as complex as regret.