Having (initially) suffered through the indecipherable gobbledygook of Sloosha's Crossin' and having commenced on the descent of the novel's story arc, it became clearer and clearer to me that Cloud Atlas isn't so much an actual story as it is a celebration of the art of fiction writing. As the various chapters wrap themselves up, a sense of familarity starts to settle in, as if these formerly curious strangers were slowly revealing themselves to actually be old friends. Heroes arise and band together. Villains make themselves known. Nefarious plots and hidden truths are revealed in a pattern not unlike the various books and movies we've engaged in.
To illustrate, in all the chapters, the ambiguous nature of the various characters slowly sharpen to set apart the good guys from the bad guys, often in various dramatic ways. In Sonmi 451, what was initially a conversation between an ascended fabricant and an archivist gradually turns into a battle of wits between a freedom revolutionary and an evil corporation's pawn. Sonmi becomes more flagrant in expressing her opinions and her revolutionary ideas to the archivist, rather than just telling her story. In turn, the archivist becomes more expressive himself, protesting Sonmi's heretical ideas. In the Pacific Journal, Henry Goose suddenly makes himself known as a real villain, poisoning Henry in an effort to steal his livelihood.
If I had read these stories as simply stories, then I would have been a bit disappointed. Nothing happens here that is particularly surprising. I've seen all of this before. However, one has to read Cloud Atlas as a whole. One of its major thematic points is that regardless of the circumstances of the world, whether it is ruled by corporations or annihilated in nuclear fire, and regardless of how people speak or look or think, there will always be people who are good and bad. There will always be people looking to exploit one another, people looking to simply get by, people who want to do the right thing, and numerous combinations of all of the above.
In making this point through its unique structure, Cloud Atlas also becomes a kind of love letter to storytelling. Its chapters stand wildly apart from one another in terms of setting, characters, plot, and voice. The abrupt shifts between these elements from chapter to chapter were difficult to not be annoyed by. Yet I think the reason I kept reading, and I think this is the same reason most people kept reading, was the element of storytelling that has compelled people to engage in stories since the beginning of the human race; this element of the human spirit, and the interplay and the battle between those that are good and those that are evil, and our eagerness to see which triumphs over the other. We have even made terms for these things: protagonist, antagonist, rising action, climax, falling action. The very existence of these terms revolves around the idea that stories are conflicts between something that is good and something that is evil, and these conflicts must be encased in a journey of sorts, and I think this is what Cloud Atlas is celebrating.
Laurence Sterne, as Tristram Shandy, meeting Death
Laurence Sterne, as Tristram Shandy, meeting Death, 1768
Kerwin--this is a very astute reading of the novel, and I especially like the last paragraph. Your thoughts there make me think of something I perhaps said in class: that one of the attractions of stories seems to be the ease with which they can compartmentalize good and evil, or endow the chain of events with a natural teleology-in contrast to the "real world," in which events have no necessary connection, and the characters we confront are impossibly mixed...
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