What does it mean to be a human being? Everyone has their own opinion and it's rarely as simple as biology. When science and technology are placed into this question, the answer becomes even less clear. This question of when giving technology to humanity makes them human has been asked in many media, from films like Her to episodes of Doctor Who and Twilight Zone, science fiction has struggled with the idea of ​​merging humanity and technology. Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris is another source of this fusion, offering in Rheya a character who is a product of inherently inhuman alien technology but who possesses human qualities and tendencies. Rheya has human emotions, as evidenced by her horror at discovering that she is a “visitor” and attempting suicide (Lem 141). She has human memories of her life before Solaris and her existence is rooted in human experience. This perceived essence of humanity is why his presence haunts Kelvin so much. If she seemed merely human but did not have the emotional capacity that she showcases in the novel, Kelvin would not be so tortured by his duality of love and fear towards her. Much like Kelvin's dual emotions, Rheya has a duel existence. She has experienced humanity, at least in her memories, but she currently lives outside the boundaries of humanity. However, these memories of humanity are not truly hers, since she is made up of Kelvin's memories of his deceased wife, she has no true human core of her own. The nature of her existence, as essential projections of Kelvin's memories of her into a living being, as well as how she self-identifies, deems her inhuman. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The main reason why Rheya cannot be classified as truly human is that she does not have her own identity. Rheya is based on Kelvin's memories of her and is therefore not a fully formed human being. People have secrets and different sides around different people, they are different people around different people. And since Rheya is only made up of Kelvin's memories, she lacks the dimensions of a real human being. Kelvin seemed to be aware of this at first, although he was convinced that it was the real Rheya the first time she appeared to him, he said, "she seemed sort of stylized, reduced to certain characteristic expressions, gestures and movements” (58). This is because it is stylized; it was made from his memories for him. If Rheya's mother or best friend were somehow on this station, they would all receive different versions of Rheya which, in turn, would still be different from the deceased human Rheya. Snow realizes this and tries to explain to Kelvin that "she is a mirror that reflects part of your mind" (154). Everything she is is a reflection, an image of how Kelvin remembers her, without the substance that makes her a real person. Snow's statement echoes something he said to Kelvin before: "We're only looking for the Man." We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors” (72). Snow argues that humans are not as adventurous and sophisticated as we believe, but rather that people look at the alien universe through the lens of humanity and expect humanity to look back at them. Kelvin has this reaction to Rheya and the Ocean itself. When Rheyadies, he is distraught and projects human emotions of malice onto the ocean, to which Snow tells him, "You treat him like a human being yourself" (192). Kelvin views the ocean as an intentional being, just as he would view a human. His inability to see things without projecting humanity onto them is seen in his relationship with Rheya. He has accepted that she is not his true wife, as he states that he does not know if he would love her if she were (146). Yet he still can't bring himself to view her as a true stranger either; he cannot see that Rheya's humanity is actually just his own memories of her. The humanity reflected back to him. Throughout the novel, Snow is used as a means to force Kelvin to question his feelings towards Rheya. When Kevin talks with Snow about Rheya, he says, "'you want opposition'" (154). Kelvin's conscience is still guilty of his wife's suicide because he left her, and these feelings have been transferred to the Rheya of Solaris. He repeatedly tells Snow that he loves her, to which Snow responds, "'His memory, you mean?' » (153). Although Kelvin denies it, it is true on a few taps. Rheya's consciousness on Solaris is made up of Kelvin's memories of her. She is, in fact, just a collection of his memories of her projected into a copy of his body. Kelvin still loves her in his memory, so of course when his memories of her seem to come to life in this version of Rheya, he would love her. Snow is not as naive as Kelvin, in fact as the reader never sees his visitors we can assume that he regularly gets rid of them when they reappear. Rheya is then the only visitor allowed to stay for an extended period of time. Meanwhile, Kelvin seems to become more and more attached to her and consider her more and more human, even confessing to her that he loves her (188). This idea of ​​a humanoid life becoming more human the more time a person spends with it has also been present in a multitude of science fiction, since Rheya is who Kelvin spends most of his time with, the more he is with she, the more human she becomes. to humans. Although Kelvin may view her as human, his motivations for doing so, his guilt and love for her, show that his view cannot be taken as a fair analysis of her humanity or lack thereof. Even the moments that seem to give Rheya some humanity. humanity is not as simple as it seems. The most human thing about Rheya is her reaction when she discovers she is a product of the ocean and separates her identity from the "real" Rheya, who died ten years ago. However, even this moment inherently shows that Rheya is not human. She separates herself from the human Rheya of the past, telling Kelvin not to "forget that it's me who's here, not her" (146). This seems to be a human moment, even though she is made up of Kelvin's memories and therefore has no identity separate from him, she seems to create one and thus gives herself a certain level of autonomy. Rheya embraces an identity, but it is not human. Before this moment in the novel, she was blissfully unaware of her origin and took her humanity for granted. Now she knows where she comes from and what she is and she accepts it, moving away from human Rheya and becoming her own person. She does not continue to claim that she is human Rheya, nor does she ever claim in the novel that she is human. In her suicide note to Kelvin, she even crosses out Rheya's name, as if to signify that she knows she isn't and never really was. His suicide could be seen as another moment of humanity or at the very least autonomy, sacrificing himself so that Kelvin would have a future.