In short, Cloud Atlas is the anti- Atlas Shrugged. For Mitchell, on the other hand, the problem is that the government has left businesses alone, and their endless pursuit of profit has cannibalized itself, so only altruistic suppression of self-will though a recognition of humanity’s interconnectedness can save us. But, for Rand, the problem is that the government won’t leave self-made businessmen alone to pursue profit in their own way, and our only hope for salvation is unbridled self-interested competition and survival of the economically fittest individual. The parallel is intentional.īoth novels end in apocalypse. But this is more true than they realized. Many newspaper editors used clever titles for their negative reviews of the film, playing on the phrase “Cloud Atlas Shrugged”. Rand imagines the titans “shrugging” the world off their shoulders, going on “strike” and refusing to let others take from them any more. It is the Greek titan who holds up the earth, the metaphor Ayn Rand used in her novel Atlas Shruggedto describe those “titans” of industry, job creators who prop up the economy while the rest of us lazily take from them. So a “cloud atlas”, is a map of souls’ movements across history.īut “atlas” is something else, too. The point is that we are all connected by a map only God knows. And the point here is not metaphysical – the author doesn’t really believe in reincarnation. The enemy I’m tempted to kill now might have been my grandmother in a past life or could return as my grandson in the next life. Note that, while it initially sounds like reincarnation – a soul can stay the same while returning under a different appearance later in history – the point is really about epistemic uncertainty (“Who can say…”) in that, whenever we are encounter someone in life, we don’t know who they were before or who they will be later. This is the clearest hint in the novel to the intention behind the device of telling six stories. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass and’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds (p. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Zachery (the post-apocalyptic Tom Hanks character in the film) says the Abbess taught him that, Having read the novel by David Mitchell, I’m a little concerned that the film would make no sense to those who don’t know the source material.įor example, the title is never explained in the movie, but comes from this passage in the book.

The Wachowski’s ambitious film Cloud Atlas (2012) doesn’t achieve everything it aims for, but it does achieve a lot of what it wants.

Cloud atlas book explained