Inside the mind of Kristin

As I have been thinking about the novel (considering our first draft is due on Friday) I googled our original topic for this class “the novel”.  I found the website http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/novel.html.  Here is the introduction:

The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other narratives, like the epic and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a story-teller. The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women. The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the materials of dream, myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is “human character as it manifests itself in society.”

It then goes on to talk about the development of the novel, reasons for the novel’s popularity, experimentation with the novel, and proliferation of types.  One of my favorite things that this person states is that the novel “represents the lives of the majority of people”.  This I think is quite true and creepy at the same time.  It’s true because in a sense it much easier to interpret then lets say poetry and shakespearean plays. However, it’s hard to think about how much it represents peoples lives especially in the novels that we have read this semester.  I personally cannot relate to a sex change or fabricating my own abduction, but I do suppose that this has to pertain to some people, otherwise how would we have such stories come about.  I think I might look into this idea of what other people think about the novel because it is definitely helping me to start getting a firm grasp on what I think the novel is.

On a side note, there are six characters in this novel, is this any way related to the name SIXsmith?  Coincidence of SIX characters, SIXsmith, SIX narratives, SIX hundred years? Doesn’t 666 represent the devil or evil or something? maybe that is ironic to the fact the class thought this novel was the antichrist anyways.  In looking up the idea of six and circle together I found out a little bit about geometry.

"a circle so related to any given triangle as to pass through the three points in
which the perpendiculars from the angles of the triangle
      upon the opposite sides (or the sides produced) meet the
      sides. It also passes through the three middle points of
      the sides of the triangle and through the three middle
      points of those parts of the perpendiculars that are
      between their common point of meeting and the angles of
      the triangle. The circle is hence called the six points circle."

This has to be some sort of ironic senario considering the fact that if you fold a six piece circle in half it will always match with it’s complement.  hm odd.  I could be reading way too much into this but I am sort of convinced that Mitchell’s intent may have been to create a puzzle out of a novel.

Cloud Atlas might be the worst novel I have ever read, yet as I state this, it could quite possibly be the most ingenious novel in terms of form.  As we all know it begins with the novel in the 19th century in journal format.  This was an easy way to get a first hand (boring) account of what was going on at the time (ships and whatnot).  Either way it gave the reader an initial chance to be introduced to diary writing and the name Sixsmith.  Then it continues on to morph into a story, then a script and then a movie.  After that it furthers it’s ideologies into a recorded interview and finally into a campfire tale.  This shows just how cyclical everything in life turns out to be.  It’s as if just when the point of destruction comes around that new life takes places and things start again.  Not to digress to far, but it also shows how a novel can impact so very many people.

Going with that idea, I am inspired to look up other reviews of this novel and see what they had thought about this form of a novel.  This is what I found:

• “Cloud Atlas is a singular achievement, from an author of extraordinary ambition and skill, setting himself challenges that would drive most authors to madness” (reviewsofbooks.com)

• “David Mitchell entices his readers on to a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then – at least in my case – they can’t bear the journey to end. Like Scheherazade, and like serialised Victorian novels and modern soaps, he ends his episodes on cliffhangers and missed heartbeats. But unlike these, he starts his next tale in another place, in another time, in another vocabulary, and expects us to go through it all again” (guardian.uk.co)

• “What is interesting is the way the author deliberately chooses a symmetric nested structure so that you have to read the entire book to see what happens to each of the characters. Each chapter until he middle of the book ends abruptly but returns in the second half of the book to continue the plot. The writing styles are wildly different, requiring a prolific writer to master the nuances” (Bonjournal.com)

I have to agree with the idea that this novel is much like being on a rollercoaster in the sense that just as the section builds up you drop back down or drop off and start up with another hill of a section.  I don’t like what the last quote says, however, in the sense that I do not need to be tricked into reading to the end of the novel and I do not think that Cloud Atlas has done that.  I suppose I feel this way because I think that writing in journal form is a cop out to an extent (as I have written in previous posts), especially when the author does so and just leaves mid sentence.