Metanarrative Moment in Cloud Atlas
From the beginning to the end, Cloud Atlas
is filled with metanarrative moments. But,
perhaps, there is no other part of the novel that exemplifies the concept of a
metanarrative more than Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everything After
. Of course, each of the
six interwoven stories in the novel is a good example of metanarrative. But, on a closer
look, unlike the other five stories that found their ways into their successor’s main
character’s hands, Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everything After
is different altogether for
some reasons only peculiar to it.
For one, Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everything After
sits as a nucleus within the litany of
narratives that make Cloud Atlas
an hourglass of a novel – distilling, at this central
place, all the other five stories into connectives that wrung its stone age-like locale and
tales into a disturbing wholeness. Secondly, this “wholeness,” one realizes, is the
paradigm of the others, the crude retelling of the principalities of human existence and
their dynamic manifestations. Its successes – the fictionalization of the other stories
which makes it a story (meta) after stories (narrative). To say, here, that it is a story
after all the other stories is to say that it both probes and gorges one’s interest in them
by giving a taste of the external influences which a metanarrative traditionally blends
with the original story.
In weaving the novel this way, so to speak, David Mitchell herds us in and out of our
immediate space, concerns, and times and Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Everything After
is
not just a story after the others but a moment in which the essence of everything
becomes plain. As we