David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas portrays many characters near the end of their lives and meditates on the inevitability of death. While some characters, like Robert Frobisher, die young and violently (in his case, from suicide), many struggle with what it means to grow older. Robert’s friend Rufus Sixsmith, for example, lives long enough to see his body grow frail from disease. He witnesses a modern world that Robert couldn’t ever have imagined, holding on to Robert’s letters as a way to remember a far-off past, although ultimately, Rufus dies in circumstances very similar to Robert’s (also by a gun to the head, in a murder staged to look like suicide). Perhaps the character who struggles the most with aging is Timothy Cavendish, who gets accidentally trapped in a nursing home called Aurora House and who struggles to convince the nurses that he doesn’t belong there. While “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” focuses on the cruel neglect of the elderly, showing how the bureaucracy of Aurora House nearly destroys the relatively healthy Timothy, the novel also deals honestly with the difficulties of aging—for instance, it depicts Timothy’s struggle to recover from a stroke. Ultimately, Timothy’s story ends on a triumphant note, with Timothy escaping the prison-like nursing home and reclaiming his former life as a publisher.
For all his flaws, Timothy is arguably a more positive character than the aging composer Vyvyan Ayrs, who tries to hold on to the past by leeching off the compositions of his young protégé, Robert. Ayrs’s efforts to plagiarize Robert’s work seem to stem from his own bitterness about aging and being forgotten, and he’s so consumed by this desire not to be forgotten that he abandons creativity, giving up on his own promising final works and instead jealously dedicating his time to controlling Robert and his work. Meanwhile, Timothy’s experiences, such as his stroke and his harsh treatment at Aurora House, force him to more directly confront his own mortality. He leaves Aurora House with a new lease on life, and instead of relying on his past successes, he tries to forge a new path by publishing Half-Lives. Cloud Atlas illustrates the inevitability of aging and dying, but it also illustrates the value of acknowledging one’s own mortality, using life’s fleeting nature as an incentive to hold on to youthful vitality, creativity, and curiosity instead of slowly fading away.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Aging and Mortality ThemeTracker
Aging and Mortality Quotes in Cloud Atlas
V.A. was unsure of himself for once. “I dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”
She plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said resembles a comet—can’t abide the woman dabbling with my skin.
Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.
I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t.
He yanks the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.
I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.
Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.
Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.
A taste of honey!
Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”
So hungrysome was my curio, I held it again, an’ the egg vibed warm till a ghost-girl flickered’n’appeared there! Yay, a ghost-girl, right ’bove the egg, as truesome as I’m sittin’ here, her head’n’neck was jus’ floatin’ there, like ’flection in moon-water, an’ she was talkin’! Now I got scared an’ took my hands off the sil’vry egg, but the ghost-girl stayed, yay.
Zachry my old pa was a wyrd buggah, I won’t naysay it now he’s died. Oh, most o’ Pa’s yarnin’s was jus’ musey duck fartin’ an’ in his loonsome old age he even b’liefed Meronym the Prescient was his presh b’loved Sonmi, yay, he ’sisted it, he said he knowed it all by birthmarks an’ comets’n’all.
The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.
“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”
“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.
“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
