The functions of the narrative structure in David Mitchell's Cloud atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell attracts readers’ attention, first and foremost, by its unusual structure that the author claims to have invented. However, there can be some more points that make this book a rather plausible choice for the classroom.

First of all, its structure – so-called “Russian doll” – is indeed quite interesting. Moreover, this book is fairly straightforward and easy to analyse. In my opinion, it makes this novel a good material for the understanding of how novels with numerous seemingly unconnected characters may work and how the connections between them can be implemented.

The fact that it is translated into Russian is probably the worst disadvantage of this book, mostly due to a rather poor quality of the translation and the fact that some of the less diligent students will inevitably want to read the translation rather than the original. This, however, may well be overridden by the fact that this novel was made into a film. Students in general tend to like watching films, and in this case, it could be interesting for the teacher as well because the film notably differs from the book and comparing them may lead a better understanding of how plot structures work.

Mitchell himself calls his novel a “Russian doll”. What it means is that there are six stories in the novel that are nested in one another with the centrepiece being told completely from the beginning to the end and all others broken in halves. Mitchell claims the authorship of this innovation. It is, however, a development of well-known and well-tried plot structures.

For example, the Russian doll structure resembles the more usual inset narrative structure that can be quite often found in both British and Russian literature. Examples include Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe . The story of in-

terest in such novels is not told or experienced by the author directly, but rather read or re-told. In Cloud Atlas , all six stories are told by their ‘authors’ and then they are re-experienced or rediscovered by other characters. Originally, inset narratives were employed by writers in order to fulfil various ends: adding some impartiality to what is being said, or incorporating different narratives into a single work (like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ). In Cloud Atlas , this insertion of narratives probably helps us see how ideas that rule people’s lives evolve or rather preserve. They are, however, told ‘in reverse’, i.e. conventionally, a story with an inset narrative starts with the latest events and then goes back to what happened previously. That is not the case with the Cloud Atlas : we start with the earliest story and only in the following one, we realise that the previous story is inset in it.

On the other hand, the Russian Doll structure resembles books with parallel narrations, where the attention of the reader is constantly switching between a number of characters. Novels with such a composition include A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks, Portobello by Ruth Rendell, Capital by John Lanchester, The Sea House by Esther Freud and numerous others. The usual effect of parallel narrations is giving the reader a broader and fuller view of the situation and, as John Mullan puts it, “ it invites the reader to make connections ” between characters and “ sense their separateness ” [Mullan, 2006: 168]. In the case of Cloud Atlas , this device probably serves the former purpose: the stories themselves are set very clearly apart, but the numerous ‘keys’ Mitchell leaves for the reader allow us to connect them, ultimately making us reach the idea that all of the fragments tell essentially the same story.

Finally, there are certain formal similarities between the Russian doll structure and the circular composition. By their nature, both end with what they start with. This type of structure gives a novel a nice sense of finish or completeness.

There are, however, some features that make the Russian doll structure distinct from all of the above. One of those is having a central story. In the Cloud Atlas, it is the story of Zachry the shepherd living in the post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Being a centrepiece, it naturally attracts the attention of the reader, and thus it has to be the ‘apex’ of the book, it has to bear some special importance. Perhaps, Mitchell’s idea was that that’s where the humanity is heading unless we change our predatory and consumerist attitude to life, so it’s a true apotheosis of the novel.

Interestingly enough, it sends us back to where we start from. In the first story (that is at the same time the last one finished in the book) we deal with the savage tribes of the Pacific isles. We see those from the perspective of a white American, Adam Ewing, who represents progress and civilization. Zachry of the last story is a descendant of those white Americans and he lives in a savage tribal community. The civilization is represented by Meronym, who is black-skinned (as a result of genetic adjustment of human bodies to make them more resistant against the solar radiation). This resembles a subtype of circular composition, i.e. the reversal or the ‘mirror composition’.

It could work nicely, were it the actual ending of the novel, but the effect is somewhat brushed because we are forced to go back again through all of the preceding stages. We have to revisit the ending in its variations six times. It must be noted though, that Zachry’s story is one of the grimmest in the book (the other ‘sad’ stories being Sonmi’s and Robert Frobisher’s), while other parts, including Ewing’s, the final one, end well. Thus, we have two key endings: the central, and the ultimate. They give us two different messages: the former states that the world is heading for disaster, and the latter gives us hope that something can be done and not all people are predatory. That is, I think, something Mitchell achieved through thoroughly crafting the formal structure of his book.

When discussing the composition of the Cloud Atlas , it is necessary to talk about both the book and the film because even though they naturally have a very similar structure, they are also very different. The team of the film directors decided to reverse the entire novel. Now it is Zachry’s story that envelopes all the others and Ewing’s is the centrepiece.

It is hard to say whether this decision is good or bad. On the one hand, it makes the whole story and the connections between its parts more obvious. When the post-apocalyptic Hawaii is seen as the contextual present, the film itself becomes a more conventional reflection on the past, thus strengthening the idea of where the world is heading to.

Using Ewing’s story as the centrepiece might also have some benefits: it gives us a great tipping point right in the middle of the sto- ry told: people from different worlds (Adam Ewing and Autua) see each other as some kind of soul mates and save each other from seemingly imminent deaths. It works fine here because before this story we see how conflicts develop and after it – how they are solved.

I think the structuring of the film is successful, but it makes the movie much more optimistic than the novel. Where Mitchell very cautiously offers a slight hope, the film is filled with the belief in the humanity. Zachry’s story gets a happy ending: he saves himself and his sister and, apparently, marries Meronym, while in the book he is the only one of his tribe who was saved and Meronym is never to become his wife or lover.

These changes, I think, are not due to the fact that it is a work of cinematography and not literature (which is probably the case with a brief revisiting of all of the stories at the very end of the film), but they are required by the structural changes: were Zachry’s story unchanged and were its ending the ultimate one, it might give the read-er/the spectator a feeling of hopelessness, which was not the intention of either David Mitchell or the film directors.

To sum up, I believe that the Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is a good example of a book with an interesting structure that is, at the same time, quite accessible for readers. It might serve well as a material for analysing how book structures work and how accents shift due to the changes of composition. The latter can be illustrated with the film, and that will probably be eagerly accepted by the students.