Cloud Atlas

First, I'll just state my opinion of Cloud Atlas, which is that, although it was a good book, it initially felt a lot like reading the introduction to the first Harry Potter book over and over again. It took a while to get into.

While I would love to say that the topic I'm going to write about is entirely my idea, I could not do so without lying. I did some research on Cloud Atlas while we were reading it, and something I came across was that each story reflected upon "Nietzschean matters of truth and perspective, the will to power, what it means to be a slave or a master, and the different methods by which one might narrativize one’s life."

Rather than analyzing how this is true, because that would be plagiarism, I will instead discuss why I find this so fascinating.

Mainly, I find it incredibly important to be able to understand someone else's ideas in terms of our own, because they will otherwise never become applicable to our lives. Mitchell manages to take Nietzsche's ideas into his own hands to create a novel that illustrates the central idea of eternal return. This is also interesting to me because he used Nietzsche's ideas to prove another one of Nietzsche's ideas, which isn't often done. Generally, we use one (or multiple) person's (or people's) ideas to support someone else's ideas.

I also just found it interesting that Mitchell managed to do this in such an interesting way, because I feel that a lot of people would rather not read a novel that pushes these ideas, but he managed to do so without anyone realizing that he was, in fact, trying to express/explain Nietzsche.

I will conclude this by saying that I'm not nearly as well-versed in Nietzsche's ideas as I could be, so I apologize if any of what I said is completely wrong or off-base.