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Chapter 42
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
Immense beyond comprehension, the red sun fills Bowman’s entire view, with thousand-mile-high flames leaping up beneath him. Still, Bowman feels no fear; whoever is controlling the pod is clearly protecting him, else he would have died of radiation long ago. Continuing across the sun, Bowman begins to find patterns in what once seemed pure chaos. Then, Bowman suddenly spots thousands of bright beads. Though hundreds of miles across and made entirely of light, the beads seem to be endowed with agency, moving purposefully towards the white dwarf. Seeing them ride up the flames of the one red sun onto the white dwarf, Bowman wonders whether he is witnessing the migration of mindless beasts, or a “concourse of intelligent entities.”
Bowman is treated to even more amazing visions, like the herd of enormous light-based entities or the double-sun. These fantastical visions serve to highlight the relative infancy of humanity compared to other species of intelligent life in the universe. Humanity may have made incredible technological progress in the million or so years since its first encounter with the monolith, but it still has far to go before it can even begin to understand the content and workings of the universe.
Themes
