of alien encounters and guidance over the development of humankind.
Bordwell and Thompson describe a narrative as "a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space" (65). There is nothing in this definition that says that the time and space involved have to be on a human scale, and in 2001 they certainly are not, extending over many thousands of years and billions of miles of space. The four sections of the film are thematically related, with the image of the huge black slab standing as the unifying force carrying thematic meaning from one segment to the next. The slab is involved in the first great step toward humanity, a step ironically involving the creation of a weapon. This weapon is visually related to all the technological developments of mankind up to the year 2001 as the bone weapon thrown into the
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