Cloud Atlas

The book I chose for this project was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I am going to talk about the first three sections not the whole book, since it is a long book and it jumps around so much it would take a lot longer to talk about. This book is a hybrid of fiction and drama. The first section of the book is “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” it is a journal written in the mid 1800s by a sailor stuck on an island while the ship he was on gets repaired. The journal has a total of fifteen entries from November to December, but is not specific about the year. In the first entry Adam Ewing describes how he meets a London doctor named Henry Goose on a South Pacific Island. The next few entries describe what he does on the island. Skipping to the sixth entry, the entry describes how the captain of the Prophetess, Ewing’s ship, wants Dr. Goose to accompany the ship to Hawaii as the ship’s doctor. Goose doesn’t know if he will yet, but Ewing hopes he will. The rest of the entries talk about how Ewing gets a tropical parasite and how he will be treated. The Prophetess setting sail again and Dr. Goose came along. Also describes how there is a stowaway that seeks out Ewing for help. The stowaway’s name is Autua; Ewing vouches for Autua and he ends up staying aboard. The last entry describes Ewing starting a Bible reading on the Sabbath and….then nothing the entry cuts off mid-sentence and moves on to the next section in the book. “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” is definitely fiction. There is almost no dialog because it is a journal and it is all of Ewing’s opinions and thoughts. The characterization is very one-sided I felt, because it was how Ewing felt about each character and that makes an unreliable narrator. Of course the point of view was first person. The tone changed a bit because it depended on how Ewing’s day went and how he felt. The setting was an island in the South Pacific, not sure which one. Then a ship called the Prophetess in the last entries. The story cutting off mid-sentence was definitely a first for me, I thought the book I had was misprinted. The next section is “Letters from Zedelghem.” This section jumps ahead nearly a century forward from Ewing’s journal. This section is a series of nine letters written by Robert Frobisher in 1931 to someone called Sixsmith and we have no idea who that is yet. Robert is a bisexual musician and there are quite a few sexual encounters, fair warning. In the first letter Robert writes Sixsmith telling him about a dream he had. Then he describes how he had to flee the hotel he was staying at, along with a young man he had left in bed, because he was unable to pay for the room. Robert is broke so he comes up with a scheme to be an assistant for the …show more content…
Most of the section is dialog The only parts that weren’t was the beginning of each chapter when they were setting the scene or when we say what the character was thinking. It was third person point of view because we knew what everyone's thoughts were. The setting was never in one spot for long, but in a general place. It seems like they were in a city in the late 1970s or early 1980s, they didn’t specify the year. The tone seems to change a lot here, but most of the time it’s a serious tone because part of the story there is a murder involved. The conflict was HYDRA against Lusia and Sixsmith, the climax was Lusia falling off the bridge and there is no falling action. The narrator was reliable because we got several sides of the story from different characters.

Cloud Atlas was a really good read. I recommend this book if you want something different. This was a very interesting book because this book is not all one story, it’s several stories that seem to have no connection and then they do connect. This book was a little crazy and somewhat hard to read at times, but it was enjoyable. There is a lot more to this book than these three sections and it is definitely worth