Cloud Atlas

by

David Mitchell

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Cycles of History Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Cycles of History Theme Icon
Greed Theme Icon
Slavery and Imprisonment Theme Icon
Aging and Mortality Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cloud Atlas, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cycles of History Theme Icon

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas contains six stories that, despite occurring at very different points in history, share many themes, motifs, characters, and events. The novel has a nesting-doll structure, where each story takes place within another story. This intricate structure highlights how history changes and repeats itself over the years.

One of the most important cycles in the book involves a comet-shaped birthmark, which the characters Robert Frobisher, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi~451, and Meronym all have in the same location near their shoulder. Taken literally, the comet could be evidence of reincarnation (particularly since a statue of the Buddha also appears prominently in one chapter). Figuratively, the comet suggests how human nature both changes and remains the same over time. All of the characters with the birthmark are different kinds of writers (Robert is a composer, Luisa is a journalist, Timothy is a memoirist, Sonmi is a manifesto-writer, and Meronym is an anthropologist), and this particular commonality suggests that humans in all eras need to tell stories, even if the forms of these stories change greatly over time.

Often the events from one story “echo” in another story, even when the events have no other direct connection. The head pains that Adam Ewing experiences on a schooner headed to Hawaii in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” for example, foreshadow the brutal slaughterhouse in “The Orison of Sonmi~451,” where fabricants (human clones) expect a boat trip to Hawaii but instead get shot in a head with a bolt and turned into meat. When Adam Ewing confronts his supposed friend Henry Goose (who betrayed Adam by poisoning him), Henry replies that he has no remorse because, as a doctor, he sees Adam as little more than “meat,” further connecting the scene to the fabricant slaughterhouse. Ultimately, the links between characters and events in Cloud Atlas suggest that human beings can’t help being connected to each other, even across long distances of space and time, implying that to truly understand humanity, one must simultaneously remember the past, imagine the future, and bear witness to the present.

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Cycles of History ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Cycles of History appears in each chapter of Cloud Atlas. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Cycles of History Quotes in Cloud Atlas

Below you will find the important quotes in Cloud Atlas related to the theme of Cycles of History.
Chapter 1 Quotes

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver, shoveling & sifting the cindery sand with a teaspoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten yards away. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility.

Related Characters: Adam Ewing (speaker), Dr. Henry Goose
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

Related Characters: Adam Ewing (speaker), Autua
Related Symbols: Hawaii
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

A telegram, Sixsmith? You ass.

Don’t send any more, I beg you—telegrams attract attention!

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Adam Ewing, Rufus Sixsmith, Vyvyan Ayrs
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Vyvyan Ayrs (speaker), Sonmi~451, Papa Song
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Sonmi~451, Meronym, Rufus Sixsmith, Vyvyan Ayrs, Jocasta van Outryve de Crommelynck
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Luisa Rey (speaker), Adam Ewing, Robert Frobisher, Rufus Sixsmith
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Luisa Rey, Rufus Sixsmith, Bill Smoke
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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!

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker), Robert Frobisher, Dermot Hoggins
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker), Denholme Cavendish, Mrs. Noakes
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), The Archivist
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:

Catechism Three teaches that for servers to keep anything denies Papa Song’s love for us and cheats His Investment. I wondered, did Yoona~939 still observe any Catechism? But misgivings, though grave, were soon lost in the treasures Yoona showed me there: a box of unpaired earrings, beads, tiaras. The xquisite sensation of dressing in pureblood clothes overcame my fear of being discovered. Greatest of all, however, was a book, a picture book.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), Adam Ewing, The Archivist, Yoona~939, Boardman Mephi, Papa Song
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …

Related Characters: Zachry Bailey (speaker), Sonmi~451, Old Georgie
Page Number: 239
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Zachry Bailey (speaker), Sonmi~451, The Archivist, Meronym, Adam Bailey
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:

List’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin’ in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not ’nuff to say-so their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day.

Related Characters: Meronym (speaker), Adam Ewing, Zachry Bailey, Adam Bailey
Page Number: 303
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Adam Ewing, Sonmi~451, Zachry Bailey, The Archivist, Meronym, Jackson Ewing
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 308
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), The Archivist, Hae-Joo Im, Papa Song
Related Symbols: Hawaii
Page Number: 343
Explanation and Analysis:

We see a game beyond the endgame. I refer to my Declarations, Archivist. Media has flooded Nea So Copros with my Catechisms. Every schoolchild in corpocracy knows my twelve “blasphemies” now.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), Luisa Rey, Zachry Bailey, The Archivist, Hae-Joo Im, Boardman Mephi
Page Number: 349
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker), Ernie Blacksmith (speaker), Mrs. Noakes, Veronica Costello
Page Number: 380
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker)
Page Number: 387
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

“I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?”

Related Characters: Luisa Rey (speaker), Dr. Henry Goose
Page Number: 403
Explanation and Analysis:

Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.

Related Characters: Luisa Rey, Joe Napier, Lloyd Hooks, William Wiley
Page Number: 435
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep.

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Luisa Rey
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 445
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Rufus Sixsmith, Vyvyan Ayrs
Related Symbols: The Comet Birthmark
Page Number: 471
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”

Related Characters: Dr. Henry Goose (speaker), Adam Ewing, Sonmi~451, Sonmi~451, Vyvyan Ayrs, Preacher Horrox
Page Number: 489
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Related Characters: Adam Ewing (speaker), Sonmi~451, Jackson Ewing
Page Number: 509
Explanation and Analysis: