Mandarax
The device itself — the handheld that recites the quotations — encrusted a million years on and still transmitting. The lump of brain coral growing on its shell is an accidental gift: the big brain, made literal.
Mandarax · the underwater set · cyanotype
The Cast of the Deep
All the pieces in the drowned world — the device, the Galápagos life, the big brain and the machines it builds, along with quiet traces of the narrator himself. Rendered as cyanotype specimens — the medium of Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae (1843), the first book illustrated with photographs.
The device
Gokubi
Mandarax's cruder predecessor, named in the novel. The device's own ancestor, drifting past — a reminder that the machine, too, has a lineage.
The stage
The seafloor
The Galápagos bottom where the device rests. That ghost in the haze is the sunken Bahía de Darwin — the cruise ship Vonnegut calls “the new Noah's ark.”
The cast (opening)
The Captain, as the new Adam, hurling the device into the sea. The thrown object is a smartphone, deliberately: the Apple of Knowledge he casts away is ours.
Sea fan
Set dressing — coral and kelp swaying on the current in the foreground, the only things still rooted.
The feather
From the feather canopy the Captain sleeps beneath in his ruined old age. It drifts down through the water like marine snow.
Galápagos life — the islands Darwin made famous
Marine iguana
Darwin's “imps of darkness,” and the islands' signature reptile — the sea-going lizard that dives and drifts.
Vampire ground-finch
Geospiza septentrionalis — Darwin's finch at its eeriest, which drinks the blood of boobies, pecking at the base of their feathers for a warm meal. Mary Hepburn knows the marooned survivors have washed up on Santa Rosalía only because she recognizes the one finch that lives there.
Blue-footed boobies
Caught mid-“Sky-Pointing” — the courtship dance in the very film Mary Hepburn screens for her students, bills raised to a peak and blue feet on show. Their caught fish are what the frigate birds rob.
Great frigate bird
The male inflates an absurd scarlet throat-balloon to advertise for a mate and lure her to a better nesting site — the courtship display in Mary Hepburn's classroom film, to the delight of her masculinity-challenged teenage boys. Vonnegut's “James Waits of the bird world,” it otherwise gets by robbing the boobies of their catch.
Galápagos fur seal
Akiko's best friend on the island was a fur seal. It is also the sleek shape humanity is quietly drifting toward.
Giant tortoise
The islands' patient icon — deep time made flesh, outliving everyone's schemes.
Great white shark
The one that finally swallows Mandarax — and Mary Hepburn with it, when she swims out to fetch the device the Captain has thrown into the sea. A million years on, sharks and killer whales are what our seal-like descendants still keep a lookout for. In the scene it is the largest and faintest thing in the water, far off in the haze.
The big brain — the only real villain
The big brain
Vonnegut's “only real villain”: the oversized human brain that dreams up everything that dooms it, then does it anyway.
The Irish elk
Antlers grown so grotesquely, ornately large they helped doom the species — the animal kingdom's exact rhyme for the fatal human brain.
The skull
What the big brain comes to. Deep time's quiet punchline, encrusted and drifting.
The war machines — what the brain builds
Fighter jet
MacIntosh's world of weapons and money. The rocket that “mates” with a radar dish is the book's monument to the whole trade.
The missile
The Peruvian rockets that scatter the castaways — “high explosives” as, in Vonnegut's phrase, a branch of the entertainment industry.
What we become
The fur-covered descendant
A gentle, furry, flippered swimmer with a small contented brain and a face still uncannily human — the far-future human a million years on, and the Kanka-bono legacy the novel ends on. It needs no Mandarax at all.
Leon Trout — the narrator's own thread
The spirochete
The syphilis Leon Trout caught in Vietnam — the disease behind the shipyard accident that made him the ghost who narrates the entire book. The most personal thing in the deep.
Vietnam
A torn chart of where the disease found him.
Sweden
The Malmö shipyard, where Leon Trout lost his head and became a ghost.
The Galápagos
Where he has haunted the Bahía de Darwin for a million years, telling us all of this.