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There are several recurring thematic motifs on Lost, which generally have no direct impact on the story itself. These repeated elements and references expand the show's literary and philosophical subtext.

Black and white

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John Locke holds up the two opposing colors of backgammon checkers in the pilot episode.

The colors black and white, which traditionally reflect opposition or dualism (i.e. yin and yang), appear frequently throughout the series. Their dichotomy is laid out in the show's pilot episode — Locke explains backgammon to Walt by holding up one black and one white piece, saying, "Two players, two sides — one is light, one is dark."

The colors are often used to represent ambiguous or contradictory natures within a character's own personality. In the opening sequence of "Raised by Another," Locke appears as an ominous image in Claire's nightmare about her unborn child, with one eyeball black and the other white. In "Deus Ex Machina," the glasses that Sawyer wears to accommodate his hyperopia are created from the frames of two different pairs of glasses: one side white, the other black.

On other occasions, the colors represent opposition between individuals. In the closing scene of "Collision," Jack and Ana Lucia, ostensibly leaders of their respective factions, face each other with Jack wearing white and Ana Lucia wearing black; in "The Long Con," Jack and Locke, immediately following an argument between the two, are seen wearing opposing white and black shirts.

However, on other occasions, the colors are featured in unexpected or unexplained ways — such as in "House of the Rising Sun," when Jack finds a pouch containing one white stone and one black stone on a pair of mummified corpses. The colors also show up in flashbacks, such as Hurley's mad dash through the airport in "Exodus: Part 2," during which he flies past a team in black and white uniforms that are numbered from left to right: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.

Eyes

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Jack's eye at the start of "Pilot".

References to eyes appear frequently in Lost. A close-up image of an eye opens many episodes of the first season, often being the eye of the character whose flashbacks are to be featured. Season One episodes which begin with an opening eye are:

• "Pilot, Part 1"

In "White Rabbit," Locke hints at his experience in confronting the island's mysterious "security system" saying, "I've looked into the eye of this island. And what I saw was beautiful." Later, in "Raised by Another," Claire has a nightmare in which Locke appears with opaque eyes, one white and the other black. The tail-section survivors discover a glass eye in the DHARMA Initiative's abandoned storage locker, and in the episode "Lockdown," when the map of the underground bunkers is revealed by blacklight, it is briefly shown reflected in Locke's eye.

Dysfunctional families

Most of the major characters have dysfunctional parents, particularly fathers, who are either absent, reluctant, or destructive. "Father issues are a big part of the show thematically," says Lost executive producer Carlton Cuse. Most notably, Locke is the victim of a betrayal in "Deus Ex Machina" by both his natural parents. Jack's broken relationship with his alcoholic surgeon father, Christian, is the impetus for him to travel to Australia, at the behest of his mother. Sawyer's mother has an extra-marital affair with a con-man; after finding out, his father kills her and then commits suicide. Kate murders the abusive man she discovered to be her biological father after believing for so long that he was her step-father. She is forced into a life on the run after her mother reveals her crime to the police. While the troubling parental relationships of these individuals have been the most explored, nearly all the protagonists have had serious difficulties with their families. In many cases, the ways in which the survivors dealt with these relationships led to their being on the island. In other words, they are "lost" both physically and metaphorically.

Literature

Episodes often mention or incorporate literary works, a point of interest to fans who try to connect them to Lost's mythology. While certain books are read by characters, others are referenced in dialogue, and some have just been glimpsed.

Sawyer is frequently shown reading, initially the books he finds in the plane wreckage, a habit which causes his hyperopia. In "Confidence Man" he spends time with Watership Down, an account of a group of rabbits trying to find a new warren. In the later episode "Numbers," Sawyer starts A Wrinkle in Time, a children's fantasy novel about a group of adolescents seeking a lost father, which contains Christian undertones about a universal battle between darkness and light. In "The Whole Truth," Sawyer is reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, a teen novel about menstruation, when Sun asks him for a pregnancy test. He calls the book "predictable."

Biblical stories and psalms are pointedly used by Mr. Eko, such as the story of King Josiah (from 2 Kings, chapters 22 and 23), which he relates to Locke in "What Kate Did," and the recitation of the 23rd Psalm in the following episode.

The Third Policeman is seen when Desmond is packing before fleeing the underground bunker in "Orientation." Craig Wright, who co-wrote the episode, told the Chicago Tribune that, "Whoever goes out and buys the book will have a lot more ammunition in their back pocket as they theorize about the show. They will have a lot more to speculate about — and, no small thing, they will have read a really great book."

In "One of Them," a man who claims to be "Henry Gale" is captured and imprisoned by the survivors. Series writer Damon Lindelof has said that the character's name alludes to Dorothy's uncle from The Wizard of Oz.

Locke gives a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to Gale during his captivity in "Maternity Leave." Gale asks if he could have a Stephen King novel instead. Shortly afterwards, Locke relates to Jack that Ernest Hemingway felt that he lived in Dostoyevsky's shadow, a situation which Gale takes to refer to the relationship between his two main captors.

The dialogue between characters occasionally refers to literature, sometimes in off-the-cuff remarks, to add context to the plot. In "White Rabbit," John Locke converses with Jack, who believes he may be going crazy chasing someone who is "not there." Locke refers to this as "the white rabbit" from Alice in Wonderland and makes his first declaration of the special nature of the Island, "Is your White Rabbit a hallucination? Probably. But what if everything that happened here happened for a reason?"

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is mentioned repeatedly throughout the season 2 finale. Desmond says he has read every Dickens novel except this one, because he is planning for it to be the last thing he reads before he dies. It is also the hiding place for his key that he uses to discharge the electromagnetic build-up in the bunker.

In the final episode of season 2, we also find out that Desmond's former girlfriend is named Penelope, the name of the wife of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. This allusion is bolstered by the fact that she says she will "always wait" for Desmond and that Desmond, whilst sailing around the world, remains lost at sea--unable to get home as Odysseus was.

Other books that are briefly glimpsed on screen or alluded to in conversation include: Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, The Turn of the Screw, Walker Percy's Lancelot, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Philosophy

By admission of the show's writing staff, some characters on Lost reference famous philosophers through their names and connection to each other. The two clearest examples, John Locke and Danielle Rousseau, are both named after social contract philosophers who dealt with the relationship between nature and civilization.

The character Locke shares his name with English philosopher John Locke, who believed that in a natural state, all men had equal rights to punish transgressors; to ensure fair judgment for all, governments were formed to better administer the laws. He contended that humans are born with a "blank slate" — a tabula rasa — without any innate knowledge or experience, and their identity is therefore a product of their decisions and choices in life. Locke believed that the state should be guided by a natural law.

Danielle Rousseau shares her surname with Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is born ignorant and amoral but with the inherent capacity to be virtuous. He maintained that the individual is corrupted by his interactions with a larger society. His concept of the noble savage hypothesised that a child raised in the wilderness, independent of human society and culture, would behave according to a fully internalized code of universal ethics. Rousseau stated that "man is born free, but everywhere, he is in chains," and coined the phrase "all men are created equal."

Introduced in the second season is the character Desmond David Hume, named after David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who was influenced by John Locke. Hume was known for his skepticism, as well as his criticism of induction. Hume pointed out that there is no logical necessity to believe that something should happen in the future based on one's experiences in the past. He argued that miracles were, by definition, a violation of the laws of nature, and thus had a very low likelihood of occurring. However, he also held that without perfect knowledge of the laws of nature, what might seem to be miraculous may in fact be perfectly reasonable and explainable, e.g., snow.

The show also references Eastern philosophies. The DHARMA Initiative, uses an acronym which refers to Dharma, the "way of higher truths" in religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The symbol used by the Initiative is called a bagua, a wheel of balance often used in feng shui.

See also

• Mythology of Lost