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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Cloud Atlas is postmodernist novel, in that it grapples with the failings and false promises of Modernism while simultaneously eschewing traditional narrative structure. Throughout the novel, Mitchell includes various important cultural figures from the early 20th and late 19th centuries, using his characters to reflect on the legacy of modernist thought. Furthermore, Cloud Atlas interrogates modern beliefs about civilization and progress, many of which emerged at the turn of the 20th century in the face of globalization, industrialization, and expanding scientific and technological capabilities.
Mitchell deconstructs modernism in Cloud Atlas, even going so far as to deconstruct and disperse his own stories' narratives in the process. Postmodernist literary works often play with form in interesting and disruptive ways, forcing the reader to contend, on a metacritical level, with the stylistic expectations they have for novels. When most readers pick up a work of narrative fiction, they tend to make a few assumptions: (1) that the events of the story will progress semi-chronologically, and (2) that the novel will have a familiar architecture, e.g., introduction, rising action, climax, falling action. While Cloud Atlas is by no means the most experimental of its postmodernist peers, Mitchell does make a clear effort to deconstruct traditional narrative architecture. The novel reads not as one story, but as six, with the later stories in the timeline referring to the events of earlier stories before they occur.
