Most of the stories in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas deal with some type of slavery. The first story chronologically, “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” depicts slavery as it existed in the real world, focusing specifically on the genocide and enslavement of the Moriori people in the Chatham Islands, as well as referencing oceanic slave trading more generally. Though the middle stories don’t overtly refer to slavery as slavery, it still exists in some form. From the locked sweatshop in “Half-Lives” to the cruel Aurora House nursing home in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” slavery takes new forms, often hiding in places where more privileged characters can ignore it. In “The Orison of Sonmi~451,” for instance, the political revolutionary Sonmi~451 argues to her interviewer, the Archivist, that their modern society can’t exist without the slave-like labor of an underclass of fabricants (synthetically created human clones), directly stating a theme that is also present in most of the other stories.
By the time at which the last story chronologically, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After,” takes place, open slavery has returned, at least for the violent Kona people, who kidnap children of rival tribes and rule a post-apocalyptic world through force. Notably, the last story inverts the power dynamic—while Adam Ewing is a privileged white man who still holds some racist beliefs in the first story, the last story begins with the Kona people abducting narrator Zachry’s brother Adam Bailey into slavery. Although the two Adams are different people, they suggest that the master in one era just might end up being the slave in another. The persistence of slavery in the Cloud Atlas stories suggests that historically, domination and exploitation have been essential parts of human civilization—and that perhaps challenging this status quo is the only way to break violent cycles of history.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Slavery and Imprisonment ThemeTracker
Slavery and Imprisonment Quotes in Cloud Atlas
He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.
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.”
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.”
Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
