Hawaii Symbol Analysis

Throughout the novel, Hawaii symbolizes how most humans live both in isolation and as part of a larger society at the same time. Although the stories of Cloud Atlas take place in a wide variety of locations and time periods, one location the action repeatedly returns to is Hawaii, which often symbolizes the endpoint of a journey. Adam Ewing takes the Prophetess to Hawaii, where the enslaved Moriori man Autua hopes to finally earn his freedom. Centuries later, fabricants like Sonmi~451 seemingly get sent to Hawaii after 12 years of service to live out their retirement—but in fact, Hawaii is a lie, and the fabricants get butchered to become food. Thus, Hawaii connects characters and stories that would otherwise seem disparate and unrelated. On the other hand, Hawaii, as a remote island, also symbolizes isolation. Many of Cloud Atlas’s characters live in solitary conditions, becoming figurative “islands” themselves. Sonmi, for example, lives in solitary confinement, while Timothy Cavendish also finds himself imprisoned and separated from his old life after he gets trapped in a nursing home. But isolation can also have its advantages; for instance, the only reason why Zachry and the Valleysmen people survive a nuclear apocalypse is that they live on their own remote island. And so, Hawaii  And so, paradoxically, Hawaii links many of the stories in the novel while also representing isolation, encapsulating both Cloud Atlas’s nested structure and its themes of human connection and isolation.