57 pages • 1 hour read
Olivie BlakeThe Atlas Six
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Knowledge as Power
The legendary fall of the Great Library of Alexandria frames the novel as a tale about power and sacrifice, underlined by the value of knowledge. Knowledge is portrayed as the target of corrupted human desires such as greed and destruction. Additionally, the characters grapple with their relationship to knowledge and must reconcile their desire for power with the moral sacrifices they are willing to make to earn it. As a source of power, knowledge is addictive and inexhaustible. The narrator says:
The trouble with knowledge, the idiosyncrasy of its particular addiction, was that it was not the same as other types of vice. Someone given a taste of omniscience could never be satisfied by the contents of a bare reality without it; life and death as once accepted would carry no weight, and even the usual temptations of excess would fail to satisfy. The lives they might have had would only feel ill-fitting, poorly worn. Someday, perhaps quite soon, they might be able to create entire worlds; to not only reach, but to become like gods (372).
Callum’s theory is that, as medeians, the six protagonists are aware of their superiority and only fake human fallibility to gain more power. This power often takes the form of knowledge, which they use to further their interests in the Society’s house or the outside world. Callum, for instance, uses the archives to research the others’ pasts and use that information against them. On the other hand, Aiya Sato, whom Reina meets when she visits the library, retrieves information from the archives that enables her to win an election. Access to the Alexandrian Society’s knowledge grants its users academic, social, or psychological power over others, enabling them to become “political leaders, patrons, CEOs, and laureates” (4).
The Alexandrian Society’s aim to curate and control knowledge is not shared by all parties in the book. The Forum is “an academic society not unlike [the Society]. It is their belief that knowledge should not be carefully stored, but freely distributed” (107). The Society believes information can be dangerous in the wrong hands and therefore needs to be shared carefully, like Atlas warning Libby against immediately calling NASA after she and Nico successfully create a wormhole for fear that that knowledge may be abused. On the other hand, the Forum’s stance is that making information free and accessible to all will allow for more innovation and level the playing field. One of its members argues that “the Society is inherently classist. [...] Only the highest-trained medeians will ever reach its rank, and its archives only serve to secure an elitist system which has no oversight” (203). Sharing knowledge would therefore dilute its power and that of the ruling class.
The value of knowledge as a source of power (be it political, social, psychological, etc.) underlies the narrative of The Atlas Six. The story also explores the ethical questions that arise from that idea, such as: Should knowledge be protected or freely shared? Who gets to decide? And, what is the medeians’ responsibility? In the end, Dalton ominously suggests that there is in fact “such a thing as too much power” (373). By that point, the new initiates have decided that they are willing to gain power/knowledge, but some have already proven unable to contain their ambition, foreshadowing dilemmas to come.
Morality as Relative
The characters’ morality in The Atlas Six shifts as they develop and gain knowledge about one another and their role in the Society. Even before they learn about the elimination, the protagonists struggle with their responsibility within and to the Alexandrian Society, as well as to society. Callum, Parisa, and Reina’s moral senses are practical and self-interested. Libby, Nico, and Tristan, however, are more explicitly plagued with self-doubt and often seek validation. But their moral codes are not immune to corruption.
Libby’s character development is a striking example of relative morality. While Callum describes Libby as “so hideously moral, so tragically insecure” (307) that her abilities are limited by her doubts, she learns to be more open to different points of view. When Parisa suggests that freedom lies in taking full ownership of oneself and not letting emotional attachments cloud one’s judgment, Libby gives in to her impulses and decides to have casual sex with her and Tristan. This makes Libby’s later confession to Tristan more dramatic. Indeed, when he asks her whether she worries about her soul, which can be taken as a metaphor for her moral conscience, she replies: “Always. [...] Constantly. [...] It terrifies me how easily I can watch it corrupt” (284).
Because the characters are self-aware and introspective, their moral dilemmas often take center stage, culminating with the question of the elimination. When they first hear about it, the characters balk at the idea. At first, their dilemma is portrayed as an impossible choice, a decision about which of them could murder another member of their group out of self-interest. However, as they each admit their desire to join the Society, the issue becomes progressively framed as a matter of protocol, a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Tristan even remarks on their increasing willingness to compromise their moral codes:
Perhaps they were being disintegrated on purpose, morality removed so they could be stitched back up with less-human parts. Maybe in the end his former beliefs would be vestigial, like a forgone tail. [...] It was astounding how easily he had come around to the idea. Shouldn’t he have balked, recoiled, run away? Instead, it seemed to have settled in like something he’d always suspected, becoming more undeniably obvious each day. Of course someone had to die (269).
Although he notes that they are leaving parts of themselves behind, such as mercy, compassion, and guilt, he eventually accepts the responsibility of killing Callum because he understands that those feelings are the only thing that can balance out Callum’s death. The initiation ritual confirms that the protagonists’ moral stance has shifted and that they have developed a different sense of morality that will serve them better in their new position. Symbolically paralleling the destruction and rebirth of the Library of Alexandria, they abandon their rigid moral stances in favor of more flexible worldviews that will supposedly enable them to achieve greater heights.
Sacrifice as the Cost of Power
Throughout The Atlas Six, sacrifice is portrayed as the necessary cost to balance out feats of magic. Greater sacrifices are required to achieve greater power. This balance is depicted as natural and unavoidable, lending it a legitimacy that sets up the book’s ending as tragically unavoidable. Indeed, the main way in which this theme manifests in the narrative is the elimination process—the necessity for five of the medeians to kill the sixth to be initiated into the Society.
Each of the protagonists grapples with the sacrifices they are willing to make to reach initiation. By accepting Atlas’s invitation to join the Alexandrian Society, they already “discarded the person [they] might have been and the life [they] might have lived” (4). Additionally, they need to decide which moral and ethical compromises they can make. Reina, for one, has an instinctive understanding of the duality of things, “that acknowledging the presence of life [means] accepting the presence of death” (263), and therefore easily accepts that one of them will be sacrificed. Libby, who is uncomfortable with moral compromises, admits that she is unable to kill someone. Tristan’s point of view perhaps best sums up their dilemma. He struggles with self-doubt and guilt throughout the story, but eventually the narrator describes Tristan’s conclusion:
It seemed to have settled in like something he’d always suspected, becoming more undeniably obvious each day. Of course someone had to die. Immense magic required a power source, and a sacrifice of this nature would be precisely that: immense” (269).
Significantly, the necessity of this sacrifice echoes the ineluctable climax of Greek tragedies. The final elimination cannot be avoided, because it is dictated both by the nature of the world (where magic has strict rules) and by the characters’ natures (fallible and greedy). Blake offers a critique of human impulses, but the structure of the narrative suggests that the characters’ morality is doomed from the beginning, for the reason that “men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that” (3).
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By Olivie Blake
