Explain the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey

[Grand Bob]

Kubrick: "Margaret Stackhouse's speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent that I've read anywhere, and I am, or course, including all of the reviews and articles that have appeared on the film, and the many hundreds of letters I have received."

Stackhouse:

The room at the end:

A. It is elegant, maybe to show man's cultural achievements, but it is sterile and silent... This is man's universe, that with which he is supposedly familiar, but even this is hostile to him.

B. Room could represent:
1. All that man can comprehend of infinity. Even in this limited scope he is confused.
2. Man's cultural history, as men remember their past before they die.
3. The trivia for which he relinquished the monolith (then at death realized the need for it).
4. A reminder of man's failure to draw on the past - it could contain more wisdom than the present.

C. In this room, man must die, because:
1. He has reached his limit; or,
2. He has failed too much; or,
3. He has been shown infinity.

... Maybe he knows what is happening to him but is powerless to change it. The changes in man may be a vision shown to him in punishment, or they may merely represent the various stages in life of one man or all men.

Theme: There is a delicate balance between the animal and divine nature in man. We will never be permitted to go beyond a certain point as individuals or a race [thus evolution is not gradual but occurs in quantum "jumps"].