The villains in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas are all characters who are willing to do whatever it takes for the sake of greed. From the murderous thief Henry Goose in “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” to the brutal Kona warriors of “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After,” some characters are willing to do whatever it takes—even kill—to make even a small profit. Many greedy characters think more in the short term than the long term The Seaboard CEO, Alberto Grimaldi, for instance, risks a nuclear accident in California, all for the sake of his company’s profit. However, Grimaldi schemes so much that he gets killed before he can put his plan into action. Greed reaches its apex in the novel in “The Orison of Sonmi~451,” where all of Korea lives under a hyper-charged version of capitalism called “corpocracy.” Under corpocracy, “citizens” become “consumers,” and poor humans suffer and die in slums to provide organs to the rich, showing the consequences of greed on a mass scale.
Greed defines not just the novel’s villains but also many of the sympathetic or morally ambiguous characters. Robert Frobisher, for example, is the protagonist of “Letters from Zedelghem,” and he struggles to pay for his own extravagant desires, tricking staff members at several fancy hotels to avoid paying his bills. Timothy Cavendish similarly tries to capitalize off a freak success at his vanity publishing company—only to face the consequences of his greed when he exploits his star author, Dermot Hoggins, leading Dermot’s violent brothers to target him. Throughout the novel, greed inevitably leads to violence, making it perhaps the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. Thus, Cloud Atlas suggests that greed is at the center of all human flaws.
Greed ThemeTracker
Greed Quotes in Cloud Atlas
He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.
A telegram, Sixsmith? You ass.
Don’t send any more, I beg you—telegrams attract attention!
V.A. was unsure of himself for once. “I dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”
He yanks the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.
I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.
Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.
Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.
A taste of honey!
Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”
Catechism Three teaches that for servers to keep anything denies Papa Song’s love for us and cheats His Investment. I wondered, did Yoona~939 still observe any Catechism? But misgivings, though grave, were soon lost in the treasures Yoona showed me there: a box of unpaired earrings, beads, tiaras. The xquisite sensation of dressing in pureblood clothes overcame my fear of being discovered. Greatest of all, however, was a book, a picture book.
Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …
So hungrysome was my curio, I held it again, an’ the egg vibed warm till a ghost-girl flickered’n’appeared there! Yay, a ghost-girl, right ’bove the egg, as truesome as I’m sittin’ here, her head’n’neck was jus’ floatin’ there, like ’flection in moon-water, an’ she was talkin’! Now I got scared an’ took my hands off the sil’vry egg, but the ghost-girl stayed, yay.
List’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin’ in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not ’nuff to say-so their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day.
The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.
We see a game beyond the endgame. I refer to my Declarations, Archivist. Media has flooded Nea So Copros with my Catechisms. Every schoolchild in corpocracy knows my twelve “blasphemies” now.
That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.
“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?