55 pages • 1 hour read
2001: A Space Odyssey
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Symbols & Motifs
Light
Light plays a significant role in the action and in the mise-en-scène of the novel. It suggests both transformation—through the recurring motif of sunrise and moonrise—and enlightenment. The novel begins, for example, with “the first faint glow of dawn [creeping] into the cave Moon-Watcher” (3). This takes place within the section of the novel called “Primeval Night,” underlining the idea that this light dawning is a metaphor for dawning intelligence and the evolution of “mind.”
The extraterrestrial lifeforms who sowed the seeds for human evolution themselves evolve into intelligence captured in light, leaving corporeal existence behind. Bowman encounters something like this when he travels through the Star Gate: “The crystalline planes and lattices, and the interlocking perspectives of moving light” (219). The monoliths they leave behind are also characterized by plays of light and by relationship with sunrise. The first monolith is described as “a rectangular slab […] made of some completely transparent material; indeed, it was not easy to see except when the rising sun glinted on its edges” (4). The second monolith is activated by sunrise, linking the light of dawn to a new stage in human development.
This image recurs toward the end of the novel, when the action takes place on the surface of a red dwarf star: “Dying? No—that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset” (203). Here Clarke returns to the metaphor of sunrise and sunsets but renders the image more ambiguous by asking readers to consider what leads humans to interpret images of light in the way they do (and in the way readers have been led to throughout this novel).
Exploration and the Figure of the Explorer
The figure of the explorer through history and in fiction is prominent in Clarke’s novel. Historical and fictional explorers are alluded to, juxtaposing the action of the novel with precedents in history and literature. For example, Bowman spends his free time reading about Pytheas’s voyage through the Pillars of Hercules and toward the Arctic at the end of the Stone Age; he also reads about Anson “pursu[ing] the Manila galleons,” Cook facing “unknown hazards of the Great Barrier Reef,” and Magellan circumnavigating the globe (93). Bowman himself has now taken up the mantle of exploration—an idea emphasized by his sense of participating in the expeditions of these past explorers.
The image of pushing the frontiers of exploration culminates in the reading of Homer’s Odyssey, a classical epic that lends its name to Clarke’s novel. Homer’s Odyssey describes Odysseus’s attempts to sail home, which are beset by catastrophe and overseen by the gods. This plot of a journey orchestrated by more powerful beings and resulting in the crew’s death maps onto Clarke’s plot: Bowman does eventually return home to Earth, transformed by his experiences and by the interventions of the “gods.” The image of a journey also takes on a temporal dimension in combination with The Need to Evolve. The “odyssey” the novel depicts is both literal and metaphorical, through time and through space.
The Monolith
The monoliths left by extraterrestrial beings are described as “unknown and perhaps unknowable symbol of [those beings’] purpose” (72). They are also referred to as Pandora’s box, referring to the myth of Pandora who, driven by curiosity, opens a box entrusted to her husband and unleashes evil on the world: “Pandora’s Box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding” (69). These monoliths defy description, starting with Moon-Watcher’s inability to understand what he is seeing because he “had never encountered ice, or even crystal-clear water” so had “no natural object to which he could compare this apparition” (4). This indescribability is also evident when Floyd encounters TMA-1, which is described in a figurative way because ordinary language can’t capture its strangeness: The “ebon surface seemed to swallow them” (69). The monolith appears to be a symbol of the unknowable and the indescribable, a significant element in a science fiction novel that attempts to imagine complex concepts in a distant future.
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By Arthur C. Clarke
