Extended Essays 2021

“ three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse at the Joyous Isles, before they were

lost… I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach… What I

wouldn’t give now for a never -changing map of the ever constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds ” 19 .

Mitchell switches from a disembodied narrator to an authorial persona to address the readers.

This act tampers with the form of the novel and is a contemporary approach. When Booth first

addressed unreliable narration in terms of Narratology, it was said that if a narrator ‘ misreports,

misinterprets or misevaluates ’ the story they are unreliable 20 . ‘ Misreport ’ means that the novel

is subject to the author interrupting the narrator, as evident in this quote. This presents the

narrator as unreliable to readers, as they are subject to interruptions from the author. Mitchell

applies these interruptions to connect the real world into the fictional world of the novel, thus

challenging the established ‘norms’ . Metafiction is additionally used by Mitchell in each of the

six different novellas. The form of Cloud Atlas is a double-ended framed narrative, but each

novel is written in its own specific form. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is written as a

series of journal entries, An Orison of Sonmi ~ 451 as an interview and Sloosha’s Cro s sin’ an’

Ev’rythin’ After as a recount. The constant change of form is how Mitchell crafts an unreliable

narrator for the readers, and as soon as the novella changes gaps are left within the story. The

ideal contemporary reader may be searching for links or symbols to ‘fill those gaps according

to the prompts established by the text’ 21 to make up for what the unreliable narrator has missed.

This is known as the contemporary Reader Response Theory, which emphasises the role of the

reader in actively constructing texts rather than simply consuming them 22 . In a similar way to

Calvino, Mitchell crafts an unreliable narrator by allowing readers to interpret his work in a

multiplicity of ways, instead o f by ‘norms’ established by himself through a traditional,

historical narrator.

19 Cloud Atlas . David Mitchell, 2004 – Page 389 20 Unreliability. The Living Handbook of Narratology 21 Approaches to Reading Practices. QCAA, 2011 22 Reader Response Criticism . Purdue University.

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