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Chapter 6: “The Little Apocrypha”
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Solaris, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Limits of Science
Religion
Human Consciousness
Love
Insanity and Conformity
Summary
Analysis
Kelvin is lying in bed with Rheya. He feels trapped, bodiless, in a “void” and longs to scream. Then light fills the room. Rheya asks him whether he had a nightmare. He says he did and asks whether she slept. She says she doesn’t think so and asks how long they’ll stay on Solaris. Kelvin thinks her question is funny, but he tells her seriously that they’ll probably be on Solaris a long time. When his eyes catch on her “little pink scar,” she asks why he’s staring at her and tells him that he seems suspicious of her somehow.
The ocean reproduced Rheya from Kelvin’s memories. Ergo, the presence of the “little pink scar” from the needle that killed her on the replica’s arm shows how traumatically present Rheya’s suicide is in Kelvin’s memory of his ex-lover. At the same time, the replica’s ignorance of her own suicide and her inhuman origins are totally mysterious: did the ocean choose to make her this way for some purpose of its own, or is this a side effect of her having been replicated from Kelvin’s mind somehow?
Themes
Kelvin holds Rheya, feeling strongly that he is “deceiving” her, since she believes she is the original Rheya. Eventually, he falls asleep again. When he wakes up, Rheya is sitting on the bed wearing a bathrobe. He sees two “absolutely identical white dresses” thrown over the chair. Rheya mentions that she had to cut herself out of one—perhaps the zipper got stuck. The dresses overwhelm Kelvin with dread. He slinks into the bathroom and holds the door shut. For a moment, nothing happens. Then Rheya tears through the door with bloodied hands, panting, and throws herself crying into Kelvin’s arms.
Implicitly, the “absolutely identical white dresses” are disturbing to Kelvin for several reasons. For one thing, they remind Kelvin that this replica is not the original Rheya—that the ocean can keep producing identical copies of the woman he once knew. This reminder emphasizes the replica’s mysterious inhumanity. For another, the two dresses remind Kelvin that he shot the first replica into orbit, an act of arguable violence that may remind Kelvin of his felt responsibility for the original Rheya’s death by suicide. It’s totally unclear whether the ocean intends to frighten Kelvin with the identical dresses, whether it simply pulled the outfit from Kelvin’s strongest memory of Rheya, or whether there is some other explanation for its continued replication of the subtly bizarre dress. Thus, the bizarre dress and the horror it causes Kelvin come to symbolize the horrifying inscrutability of the alien ocean itself. Meanwhile, Rheya’s violent reaction to Kelvin’s disappearance emphasizes that she is not human and that she will sometimes act out according to alien laws and logics.
Themes
Kelvin carries Rheya to the bed. Crying and examining her bloody hands, she asks what happened. Kelvin tells her that she injured herself breaking down the bathroom door. As he fetches first aid supplies and tends to her hands, he asks why she did it. Alarmed, she says she doesn’t remember doing it—only that Kelvin disappeared, she got scared, and she started looking for him. She asks whether she might have epilepsy. Kelvin dismisses this idea. He leads Rheya to the medical bay and takes a sample of her blood.
The replica of Rheya is unable to remember her inhuman outbursts. Why? Did the ocean construct her to believe in her own humanity as a way of manipulating Kelvin’s responses to her, or is her belief in her humanity a natural effect of her being based on Rheya, a human woman? Neither Kelvin nor the reader knows enough about the ocean to judge, emphasizing its alien inscrutability.
Themes
Snow calls Kelvin on the videophone and informs him that Sartorius wants all three of them to conference via videophone, with their screens covered, in an hour. Kelvin agrees. After a pause, Snow asks how Kelvin is doing. Kelvin says he’s doing okay and asks after Snow. Snow replies that he’s doing “not so well.” Suddenly, Snow starts yelling at someone in the room with him to “stop” and abruptly hangs up.
Sartorius wants to cover his videophone screen, while Snow abruptly hangs up when “someone” in the room with him begins acting out. The scientists’ secretive behavior, presumably prompted by wanting to hide their visitors’ identities, hints that the visitors the ocean has sent to them reveal things about their minds or personalities that they don’t want to face or don’t want others to know about.
Themes
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Kelvin examines Rheya’s blood under a microscope. At first, it looks normal, but as he enlarges the image, it dissolves into bright light when it should show atoms. He takes another sample of her blood and adds acid to it. The acid destroys the blood, as expected—but then, unexpectedly, the blood regenerates.
The dissolution of Rheya’s cells into bright light when they are magnified past a certain point represents how the scientists seem to be able to understand certain physical and scientific facts about the ocean—only for their certainties to crumble as they seek fuller, more complete understanding.
Themes
As Kelvin stares at Rheya’s “impossible” regenerating blood, Rheya points out that the videophone is buzzing. After Kelvin picks up, he notices that Snow and Sartorius have covered their cameras. Sartorius greets Kelvin, suggests that the three of them share information about their visitors, and asks Kelvin to go first. Kelvin, acutely aware that Rheya is watching him, elliptically suggests that whereas humans are composed of atoms, the visitors are composed of subatomic particles—neutrinos—and their apparent cellular structure is just “camouflage.”
Neutrinos are minute elementary particles that were only directly detected in 1956, five years prior to the publication of Solaris, though their existence was theorized decades earlier. By suggesting that the ocean constructed the replicas out of neutrinos and calling the replicas’ cellular structure “camouflage,” Kelvin is insisting on the replicas’ radical alienness and inscrutability despite their surface-level indistinguishability from human beings.
Themes
Sartorius asks why the visitors have come, defining them as “projections materializing from our brains,” not “copies of actual persons.” Kelvin agrees with that definition, saying that if the visitors are taken from scientists’ memories, it would explain why a given visitor sometimes knows more than “the individual of whom it is a copy.” Sartorius notes that while it would make sense to suppose that Solaris is experimenting on the scientists, it seems like a badly designed experiment: whereas the scientists would notice flaws in their methodology as they proceeded and amend their methodology accordingly, the visitors reappear exactly as they were before the scientists got rid of them.
The distinction that Sartorius draws between the replicas as “projections materializing from [the scientists’] brains” versus “copies of actual persons” emphasizes that the ocean has no direct knowledge of or access to the original people it is replicating. It only knows of Rheya, for example, through Kelvin’s memories and ideas of her. As such, the replica of Rheya is more a commentary on Kelvin and his love for the original Rheya than it is an illustration of what the original Rheya was truly like. Meanwhile, Sartorius’s attempt to analyze the ocean’s behavior and motives according to his understanding of human scientific methodology shows that he is unable to stop anthropomorphizing the ocean despite his knowledge that it is a radically alien entity.
Themes
Sartorius suggests that the visitors’ behavior is incompatible with the experiment hypothesis, given the “precise” competence of Solaris’s ocean in other realms. Then he points out how the visitors sometimes behave in “nonhuman” ways if a situation violates their comfort zone. He speculates that the ocean doesn’t understand “individuality” and so doesn’t comprehend how upsetting the visitors are. Then he argues that Kelvin’s neutrino hypothesis gives them an opening: if they can counteract whatever magnetic field is stabilizing the neutrino structures . . .
Sartorius’s speculation that the ocean doesn’t understand “individuality” is intriguing: if correct, it would indicate that the ocean means no harm by sending identical replicas in identical clothes to visit the scientists, but merely fails to understand the horror that such replicas would provoke in an individualistic species like humankind. Yet readers have no way of gauging whether Sartorius’s speculation is correct: both readers and the scientists lack adequate evidence to prove the speculation true, thus emphasizing yet again the ocean’s alien inscrutability. Meanwhile, Sartorius’s desire to disrupt the neutrino structures—i.e. the visitors—hints that he is so disturbed by whatever his own visitor suggests about his mind that he wants to kill it rather than study it.
Themes
Suddenly the covering slips off Sartorius’s camera and he starts yelling in anguish at someone to go away. He cuts his screen, but not before Kelvin sees a straw hat. Kelvin asks whether Snow is still there. When Snow, sounding exhausted, replies, Kelvin realizes that he likes Snow and doesn’t want to learn who Snow’s visitor is. He asks Snow to come see him. Snow agrees but says he’s not sure when it will be.
Sartorius’s anguished reaction to the other scientists’ brief glimpse of his visitor, along with Kelvin’s reluctance to see Snow’s visitor, emphasizes that the visitors reveal things about the scientists’ minds and personalities that they may not have known themselves and wouldn’t want others to know.
Themes
