The Eternal Recurrence of (Hi)Story: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Abstract

This article analyses the structural and thematic repetitions in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Similar motifs and character types are re-used in the novel's circular rather than linear structure. It is argued that, while staging a dialectic of sameness and diff erence, Cloud Atlas eschews the Platonic hierarchy of a model and its copy and blurs the distinction between the real and the fi ctional. All the six interlocked narratives that build the novel may be regarded as artefacts, remediated and encased in other artefacts. The same material is reconfi gured in an endless cycle, which, as the article argues, harks back to the second, Nietzschean model of repetition distinguished by J. Hillis Miller in Fiction and Repetition.