The Characters In David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is an epic adventure across time. With an air of mystery and the supernatural, the novel enchants readers for all of its five hundred and nine pages. One of the novel’s most intriguing features is its construction. Cloud Atlas is a collection of six stories spanning from the mid-1800s to the distant future. Each story is told half way through and then interrupted by the next, until the sixth, and chronologically last, story. After the sixth story is told in its entirety, the others resume, but in reverse chronology. Thus the novel ends with the conclusion of the first story. This unique story-telling method provides the reader with engaging tales, while not taking away from the others. Each story is also imbedded into the others, whether it be in the form of a book, letters, a movie, or otherwise. The six tales in Cloud Atlas are still independent, in

In it, humans are doomed to fall, but with acts of kindness and friendship, the exploitation of the weak by the strong can be eliminated. It is a hopeful story that inspires us to believe that, in Adam Ewing’s words, “diverse races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree … such a world will come to pass” (508). The Cloud Atlas movie places this theme at the wayside, and focuses on the nature of fate and love. Relationships are expanded and invented, to create a world where love can triumph over death. The stories of the novel are like fibers twisted together to make a rope. They are individual, with a few stray threads here and there, but together they are strong enough to raise the flag of a better future. The stories in the movie are more like tiles in a mosaic. Each story is a color, and the different colors come together to create an image. They mosaic may be made out of many stories, but together, they form one story, a story of two people embracing across