Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Collaboration vs. Individualism
Tools and Human Evolution
Space Travel
The Perils of Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
“Beyond hope and beyond despair,” Bowman adapts completely to his solitary life. Conscious of his impending status as humanity’s sole representative, however, he maintains himself, keeping clean and sticking to a healthy routine. Still, he is not unaffected by his isolation, slowly becoming intolerant of silence. He listens to plays, and then, bored by their now-trivial plots, to purely instrumental music. Saturn nears, and Bowman becomes mesmerized by the planet’s system of rings. Created only a few million years ago, humanity is lucky to have seen them at all; eventually, gravity will pull them away from the planet. No one has ever contemplated the coincidence that Saturn’s rings were formed at the same time as humanity.
Increasingly alienated from human experience yet aware of his responsibility as humanity’s sole representative, Bowman makes efforts to maintain his sanity and health. He sticks to a rigid routine, successfully maintaining himself physically as well as mentally. Still, there are signs of Bowman’s struggles with isolation. Unable to bear silence, he listens incessantly to plays and novels. However, he soon finds that he cannot relate to the human dramas in these works, and transitions to pure instrumental music. This underscores the psychological impact of his isolation: while he still yearns for human contact, his experience is increasingly removed from the typical human experience.
Themes
