Narrative Resonance and Ontological Instability in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Abstract

This article uses narrative resonance as a theoretical approach to examine the narrative and ontological instability in VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation. The study adopts a qualitative research design based on document analysis, with the novel as the primary source. The analysis is organized according to four interrelated categories: convergence events, narrative collapse, antagonistic interference, and echo entities. These categories are discussed in relation to posthumanism, ecocriticism, cognitive and unnatural narratology, and Anthropocene studies. In this study, ontological instability refers to the destabilization of boundaries between human and nonhuman, subject and environment, materiality and language, and stable and uncertain forms of reality in Area X. The results show that convergence events arise when memory, perception, environment, and language overlap to form unstable configurations of meaning. The biologist’s coherent sense of identity, perception, and epistemic certainty collapses progressively, leading to narrative collapse. Antagonistic interference arises from the conflict between human systems of rational explanation and the alternative logic of Area X, demonstrating the limits of anthropocentric frameworks of knowledge and reality. Echo entities emerge from the persistent traces of past expeditions, memories, language structures, and temporal remnants that shape the current story. Together, the four analytical categories suggest that the novel’s narrative and ontological instability are mutually constitutive, as narrative meaning destabilizes in tandem with the disintegration of fixed boundaries between the human subject and the nonhuman world. The study thus presents the novel as a major case of posthuman and Anthropocene fiction in which meaning is shaped through the dynamic interaction of cognitive, ecological, material, linguistic, and temporal forces.