Contact: A Novel

The novel’s opening chapters employ a nonlinear narrative structure to frame Ellie Arroway’s scientific pursuit as a personal and spiritual quest. By beginning with a series of flashbacks to her early life, Sagan emphasizes the protagonist’s exceptionally inquisitive nature and foreshadows her lifelong search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Essentially, Ellie’s childhood is presented as a series of intellectual awakenings, from dismantling a radio and idly contemplating the Earth’s rotation to delving into the mysteries of Pi (π) and discovering the nature of transcendental numbers. These vignettes establish her burning need to discover new truths about the very fabric of the universe, and her lightning-fast progression through the relevant scientific fields thus takes on the mythic quality of a quest as she immerses herself in the Search for Meaningful Contact beyond the limited boundaries of the Earth.

Notably, her personal search for contact and greater intimacy dovetails with her professional quest for illumination, and in both endeavors, she seeks out another consciousness—whether human or otherwise—who will be willing and able to meet her mind-to-mind. Yet even when Sagan is relating the most important moments of Ellie’s life, he never loses sight of the grander, cosmic picture, and to this end, many of the chapters are preceded by brief, enigmatic descriptions of the alien radio signal making its way inexorably toward the Earth. Only by employing the third-person omniscient perspective can Sagan weave such a vast canopy of lofty philosophical contemplations and situate Ellie’s moment-to-moment struggles and triumphs within a broader cosmic context. As Ellie and her colleagues achieve progressively greater human endeavors, these frequent reminders of the cosmic scale introduce the novel’s focus on Overcoming Human Provincialism, for at every turn, the author’s descriptions of terrestrial urgency are contrasted with the omnipresence of mute galactic patience. The epigraphs preceding each chapter further contextualize the narrative, for these remarks from historians, writers, poets, and other notable figures situate the novel’s inquiries within a long tradition of human contemplation on the very nature of existence, knowledge, and belief.

Given that Contact was published in 1985, Sagan’s critique of the rampant sexism and misogyny in the scientific fields indicates that he was ahead of his time in many ways. Rather than bowing to the patriarchal norms of these largely male-dominated areas, he uses the character of Ellie to pointedly draw attention to the social and cultural disparities that existed, and these observations are still relevant today. To this end, the structure of the novel foregrounds Ellie’s often contentious interactions with various male authority figures, and it is clear that her relationships with the men in her life are often ambiguous at best. Only her late father, Theodore, represents an ideal of intellectual encouragement, and his death creates a void that she subconsciously seeks to fill throughout her adult life.

This foundational relationship contrasts sharply with the dismissive patriarchal authority embodied by her stepfather, John Staughton, and her doctoral advisor, David Drumlin. Staughton’s assertion that physics is a “foolish and aberrational notion” (11) for a girl drives Ellie to prove him wrong by following her deepest passions. Likewise, Drumlin’s patronizing attitude exemplifies the systemic sexism that Ellie must overcome in her professional life in order to be heard and respected. These figures represent the provincial human barriers—gender bias, intellectual territoriality, and ego—that stand in opposition to the collaborative spirit required for the completion of her cosmic search for extraterrestrial life.

Even Ellie’s less important relationships illustrate the patriarchal standards that she must challenge and overcome, for her relationship with the musician, Jesse, comes to an end when he presumes to suggest that she abandon her intellectual passions and education in order to have children. Yet Sagan’s outlook is not entirely bleak, for with every misogynistic male that Ellie counters and rejects, she finds a like-minded colleague with whom to exchange ideas on an equal basis. In this context, fellow scientists like Peter Valerian and Vasily “Vaygay” Lunacharsky offer a far more supportive model of scientific inquiry, engaging with Ellie as an equal and openly championing her views in public forums.

In the middle of Ellie’s diverse intellectual development, Sagan also carves out space for one of the novel’s primary purposes: the age-old struggle of Reconciling Faith and Reason. As is firmly established by Ellie’s distaste for the mandatory Bible classes of her youth, her initial encounters with organized religion position her as a skeptic who lends far more credence to empirical evidence than to the force of holy writ. However, her scientific curiosity is imbued with a sense of wonder at the “numinous” that is so intense that it is portrayed as a personalized religion of her own. For example, her childhood experience of feeling the Earth’s rotation reflects her visceral, physical sense of unity with the cosmos, and even as an adult, she never loses her capacity for wonder. This dynamic reappears again in Chapter 9, where Ellie reads Ken an encyclopedia entry on the “numinous” and appropriates this theological term to argue that her awe in scientific discovery is also a form of sacred experience. With this scene, Sagan suggests that science and religion are not incompatible after all; instead, he frames them as parallel pursuits of the same human impulse for transcendence. By defining scientific inquiry itself as a valid path to the numinous, the narrative challenges the simplistic dichotomy that artificially separates the two domains. These conversations thus set the stage for Ellie’s contentious dialogue with Palmer Joss and Billy Jo Rankin.

The symbolic framework established in these chapters provides a lexicon for the novel’s primary concerns, particularly with the introduction of Ellie’s fascination with Pi (π). For her, this enigmatic mathematical concept represents a hidden, transcendent order that is embedded in the universe. Her early interest in this idea emphasizes her precocity and foreshadows the novel’s final revelation: that Pi (π) is essentially an “artist’s signature”—a piece of evidence that the universe itself has an author, whoever or whatever it may be. In accordance with this topic, the signal from Vega (thereafter referred to as the Message), introduces the concept of the palimpsest—a text with multiple layers of writing and meaning. Specifically, beneath the surface level of the prime numbers, the signal also carries a reflected Earth broadcast, and beneath that lies a complex data stream. All of these layers challenge the scientists to gain a deeper understanding by looking beyond the obvious. For most of Ellie’s life, she has been listening avidly to the cosmic “white noise” for a sign of something that signals extraterrestrial intelligence, and now that she has discovered it, the real challenge will be to determine whether her own level of intelligence is enough for her to find a way to communicate—to make true “contact.”

However, Ellie’s intellectual zeal is contrasted by the spiritual chaos (and sometimes the obtuseness) of humanity itself. Through the global reaction to the Message, Sagan critiques humanity’s shortsightedness and highlights its many internal divisions. This dynamic is soon revealed when the moment of discovery is immediately followed by a barrage of petty political anxieties, such as Michael Kitz’s single-minded focus on national security, David Drumlin’s professional jealousy, and the United States’s irrational impulse to hoard the data from the signal for itself. These actions—all of which are contrary to the adventurous spirit of science—illustrate the difficulties that Ellie and her colleagues will have with the struggle of overcoming human provincialism.

The retransmission of the 1936 Berlin Olympics broadcast serves as an ironic symbol of this provincialism, for many of the political characters are aghast at the thought that humanity’s first interstellar greeting is an image that represents its most destructive tribal impulses—fascism, nationalism, and racial supremacy. On a broader level, the president’s dismay that television broadcasts are humanity’s primary ambassador to the cosmos functions as a direct critique of a culture that floods the void with triviality, and it is clear that the arrival of the Message will force all of humanity to confront its innate immaturities. The scientific necessity of global cooperation is by itself enough to force humanity to shift slowly and reluctantly away from these territorial squabbles, and the formation of the World Message Consortium therefore represents a nascent form of planetary unity: a new mode of thinking compelled by contact with a greater reality.