Cloud Atlas Study Guide

David Mitchell was born and raised in Northern England. He obtained a degree in English and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Kent, then spent eight years in Hiroshima, Japan, where he met his wife and taught English to technical students. He published his first novel, Ghostwritten, in 1999. The book received widespread acclaim, and his next two novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), have gone on to become perhaps his best-known works. Mitchell has published a total of nine novels, along with several stories and essays. He has also written for film and television, including Sense8 and The Matrix Resurrections. Mitchell currently lives in County Cork, Ireland, with his wife and two children.

Several of the stories in Cloud Atlas take inspiration from real-life events. “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” deals with the real genocide and enslavement of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands. The events of “Letters from Zedelghem” resemble the life of British composer Frederick Delius and his assistant Eric Fenby. “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” draws inspiration from the life of Karen Silkwood, a real union activist and whistleblower who died in a mysterious car crash. Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas near the beginning of the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, which may have influenced the novel’s themes of violence and pacificism.

Cloud Atlas takes inspiration from the postmodern novels of the late 20th and early 21st century. In particular, its structure resembles Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, which also contains several stories that get interrupted. Some of Cloud Atlas’s stories contain direct references to previous works. “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” for instance, references Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In addition, the story “An Orison of Sonmi~451” features human clones with a limited lifespan called fabricants that bear a strong resemblance to replicants in the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, which is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.