Cloud Atlas

by

David Mitchell

Themes and Colors
Cycles of History Theme Icon
Greed Theme Icon
Slavery and Imprisonment Theme Icon
Aging and Mortality Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cloud Atlas, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Greed Theme Icon

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.

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Greed ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Greed appears in each chapter of Cloud Atlas. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Greed Quotes in Cloud Atlas

Below you will find the important quotes in Cloud Atlas related to the theme of Greed.
Chapter 1 Quotes

He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

Related Characters: Adam Ewing (speaker), Autua
Related Symbols: Hawaii
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

A telegram, Sixsmith? You ass.

Don’t send any more, I beg you—telegrams attract attention!

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Adam Ewing, Rufus Sixsmith, Vyvyan Ayrs
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Robert Frobisher (speaker), Vyvyan Ayrs (speaker), Sonmi~451, Papa Song
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Luisa Rey, Rufus Sixsmith, Bill Smoke
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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!

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker), Robert Frobisher, Dermot Hoggins
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker), Denholme Cavendish, Mrs. Noakes
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), Adam Ewing, The Archivist, Yoona~939, Boardman Mephi, Papa Song
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

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 …

Related Characters: Zachry Bailey (speaker), Sonmi~451, Old Georgie
Page Number: 239
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Zachry Bailey (speaker), Sonmi~451, The Archivist, Meronym, Adam Bailey
Page Number: 263
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Meronym (speaker), Adam Ewing, Zachry Bailey, Adam Bailey
Page Number: 303
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), The Archivist, Hae-Joo Im, Papa Song
Related Symbols: Hawaii
Page Number: 343
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Sonmi~451 (speaker), Luisa Rey, Zachry Bailey, The Archivist, Hae-Joo Im, Boardman Mephi
Page Number: 349
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Timothy Cavendish (speaker)
Page Number: 387
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Luisa Rey, Joe Napier, Lloyd Hooks, William Wiley
Page Number: 435
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”

Related Characters: Dr. Henry Goose (speaker), Adam Ewing, Sonmi~451, Sonmi~451, Vyvyan Ayrs, Preacher Horrox
Page Number: 489
Explanation and Analysis:

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Related Characters: Adam Ewing (speaker), Sonmi~451, Jackson Ewing
Page Number: 509
Explanation and Analysis: