Finding stories to tell: metafiction and narrative in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

Abstract

Though David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas was only published in 2004, critics have already written a number of articles and book chapters about this work. The complex structure and numerous ideas Mitchell explores lend themselves to viewing the novel through a variety of critical lenses, leading to more articles than one might expect on a novel less than a decade old. Thus far, though, people have been writing on subjects such as the novel's comments on environmentalism, genetics, or cloning, while others focus on Mitchell's view of history. Whenever the novel's structure is discussed, critics spend most of their time identifying Mitchell's literary inspirations or discussing the story-within-story structure as little more than a postmodern trick.