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Chapter 16
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
Bowman and Poole operate on a meticulous 24-hour schedule, both for the ship’s sake and for their own well-being. Bowman starts his day at 0600, automatically waking with or without an alarm clock. From there he follows a rigid routine, exercising and reading the news until relieving Poole on the Control deck at 0700, running various diagnostic tests on the ship. From 1000 to 1200, Bowman studies; a specialist in multiple fields, he is uniquely suited to the eclecticism of space-travel. From 1200 to 1300, Bowman eats lunch with Poole, after which he begins a three-hour tour of the ship’s life support systems in the ship’s habitable section—the spherical pressure hull heading the arrow-shaped vessel.
Here, the narrator describes the meticulous daily routines of Bowman and Poole. Ironically, despite the initial purpose of these schedules being to maintain their sanity and humanity, the result is ultimately a dehumanizing one, at least from a bird’s-eye point of view. With every second of their day choreographed, Bowman and Poole become not only hard to distinguish from one another, but also from Hal, a computer.
Themes
At 1600, Bowman finishes his inspection and makes a report to Earth. At 1800, Poole takes over command, and Bowman enjoys six hours off-duty, studying, listening to music, or watching movies. Recently, he has become obsessed with great expeditions of the past, like the Odyssey. Sometimes he plays games with Hal, who is programmed to win only half of the time. He ends his day with dinner at 2000, and then has an hour to make calls to Earth. Being unmarried like all his colleagues, however, Floyd has already begun to lose interest in these. Poole’s routine is the “mirror image” of his own, offset by six hours. Since the men are too intelligent to fight, their journey has so far been frictionless.
The narrator continues to describe the daily routines of Bowman and Poole. The level of detail provided here further reinforces, on a textual level, the dehumanizing effects of their finely-tuned schedules. Like cogs in a machine, Bowman and Poole move throughout the ship, along the same paths, at the same times, every day, weaving in and out of one another’s paths seamlessly. The narrator’s suggestion that their schedules are “mirror images,” in this context, is not only a literal statement, but also a potent metaphor for their interchangeability.
Themes
