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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

File:Pilot2backgammon.jpg

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. Also to be noted would be the Hanso Foundations logo, a black and white emblem.

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 as-of-yet 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.

Eyes

References to eyes appear frequently in Lost. The pilot episode starts with the close-up of Jack's eye opening up. Similar images of an eye begins many episodes of the first and third seasons, often being that of a character whose flashbacks are to be featured. Likewise, the second and third season premieres also start with a close-up of an eye of a new character introduced in that episode. 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,(which could belong to the one eyed man that appeared on the security tape right before Eko was killed) 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.

Familial dysfunction

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. Hurley was abandoned by his father as a child. Sun's father on the other hand keeps his illegal activities a secret from his daughter and she remains unaware that her husband Jin has been forced to carry out illegal activities for him and that her father tried to have her lover killed. 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.

Literature

Episodes often mention or incorporate literary works, or use the name of a literary work as an episode title -- 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 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 "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 of the same name. Although he doesn't recite the psalm as it is in The Bible, that is because he wasn't a real priest, as it says in the extra material of the 2nd season.

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. In the third season opener, A Tale of Two Cities, a flashback shows a group of the Others discussing the Stephen King book Carrie, and one of them insists that "Ben"—who is later revealed to be Henry Gale—"would not like King's work."

Locke also relates to Jack that Ernest Hemingway felt that he lived in Dostoyevsky's shadow, a situation which Gale uses against Locke to disparage 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," Jack tells John Locke that 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?"

In "Every Man for Himself", Ben shows Sawyer a white rabbit with the number 8 on its back inside of a cage. This is a clear reference to Stephen King's memoir On Writing. In the book, King describes the rabbit mentioned above in an effort to show how an author's descriptions in literature are often purposefully vague to allow the reader to fill in gaps.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is mentioned repeatedly throughout the season two 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.

Other literary works 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, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Island, Of Mice and Men, and A Brief History of Time

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 Swiss 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 a miracle, by virtue of its definition, could not exist. He posited that an occurrence in violation of the laws of nature does not constitute an act of divinity because however unlikely that occurrence is, the simple fact that it has happened necessitates the possibility of it happening; thereby precluding the existence of miracles. He also holds that without perfect knowledge of the laws of nature, what might seem to be miraculous may in fact be perfectly reasonable and explainable.

In the third season, we meet the character Mikhail Bakunin, named after the philosopher of the same name who was one of the fathers of modern anarchism. The last surviving member of the Dharma Initiative, the character Bakunin lives by himself in the woods in one of the Initiative's observation points -- an allusion, perhaps, to the philosopher Bakunin's imprisonment in the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress and later exile to Siberia.

The show also references Eastern philosophies. The DHARMA Initiative uses an acronym which refers to Dharma, the "way of higher truths" in religions such as 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