Rheya Character Analysis

Rheya's First Appearance to Kris Kelvin Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris tells the story of Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, who goes to the ocean planet Solaris to study the phenomena taking place there. Upon arrival at Station Solaris, which hovers over the surface of the planet, he is warned by the scientists on board that they have been receiving mysterious visitors. Kris first encounters one of these visitors outside of Gibarian's room, but does not have one of his own until he wakes up to see his deceased wife, Rheya, sitting in the room with him. The entirety of Kris's first encounter with Rheya not only gives us some background information on Kelvin's life, but also foreshadows many of the things to come later in the book. Kris reacts very much like
When the visitor Rheya tried to fill in the blanks, however, Kris could immediately see that they were not right, even if he was not sure what the “right” gesture was. Second, the ocean was not able to create perfect replicas. Although it had progressed a long way from creating partial replicas of machinery to gardens and oversized babies, it still had not perfected human motor skills. Although Rheya's perfectly true to life appearance could be some of the most convincing evidence that the visitor Rheya was the real Rheya, her appearance is also some of the strongest proof against her being real. It had been 10 years since she had died, but she had not aged at all. If she had been alive during that time period, she certainly would have aged some. In addition, she also had the scar from the hypodermic needle she had used to inject the lethal solution she used to kill herself. I believe visitor Rheya's flaws can be attributed to the imperfect ability of the ocean to recreate objects. In addition, the visitors were created from the memories of their hosts, but the ocean did not have the power to modify its creation after interpreting the memories, so it could not “update” any of Rheya's