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Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—Personal Narrative:
Throughout the novel, Mitchell switches between several different narrators. Each of these narrators is unreliable in their own way, with questionable opinions on civilization, race, gender, morality, politics, etc. that should not be taken at face value by the reader. These narrators are purely subjective voices, intended by Mitchell as a kaleidoscope of various societies at certain points during the history of the human race.
In effect, Cloud Atlas is a small cross-section of humanity's history as a species. Each of the six narratives that comprise Cloud Atlas can be viewed as a historical document. As such, each chapter demands to be examined as a historian might examine a primary source document. First-person primary source documents are unreliably narrated insofar as any person's firsthand account of their own life is unavoidably biased in various ways. The writer, for example, may espouse ideas that a historian or reader should not accept as factual. However, the presence of such ideas is still informative: helpful, even, to historians attempting to understand the values, culture, and morals of previous generations.
Each narrative in Cloud Atlas should be analyzed as a primary source document from its historical time period—an artifact containing important information about past civilizations. The narrators of these primary source documents need not be reliable. They simply need to be authentic. In doing so, they provide a window into the past, looking in on the culture that shaped them.
Related Themes:
