His soul journey: He starts off by being pompous and self-serving but learns humility over time. Her soul journey: She goes from being a powerless figure to a goddess revered by a simple tribe, the only link they have to their pre-apocalyptic past. HUGH GRANT Who he plays: A reverend and a plantation owner in ; a hotel clerk trying to collect from Ben Whishaw; the owner of a nuclear power plant in who wants it to fail and kill millions; the cuckolded brother of Jim Broadbent who tricks him into committing himself to a nursing home; a Korean restaurant manager in who sleeps with his clone workers; the leader of a band of cannibal warriors in His soul journey: Despite a charming exterior at first, he never really cares about anyone, and this only gets worse over time; he devolves into a pure savage.
His soul journey: A little muddled. She meets Rufus Sixsmith, who was working as one of the scientists of the power plant, but was forced to quit due to his safety report concluding the power plant to be dangerous. The protagonist is put to the retirement home by his own brother and cannot escape.
She becomes self-aware due to the members of rebellion and becomes their leader. Zachry, an old man and the protagonist, tells the story from his youth to children. The valley folk worship the goddess named Sonmi and recall the fall of civilization that has led them to primitivism. The island is occasionally visited by technologically advanced people and anthropologists known as Prescients who study the valley folk and trade with them.
The novel seems to attract two main readings to itself. A number of critics focus on the aspects of history, human nature and character connections, while others tend to focus more on the narratological aspects of the novel.
Mitchell explores human condition in different places and times to suggest patterns that transcend historical circumstance. The characters are bounded with one another in different time periods. Readers observe an idea of butterfly effect that signifies that if one character did a specific thing might affects another character in the future. There are many instances that indicates connection between different characters through a butterfly effect.
The birthmark that connects the characters implies that they are different incarnations of the same soul. Moreover, from this it can be inferred that author might make these connections so that society believes in faith and the religious facts of reincarnation so that people will do good things not sins so that no other soul in the future will suffer from the past lives sins that are done by the other characters. The comet shape symbolizes a cycle because many comets have circular orbits and reappear every few years in the sky.
This infers that Zachry believes in reincarnation of a soul. From this perspective it can be said that the novel explores different incarnations of the same soul and its journey throughout different time period. I believe that the birthmarks merely denote that the stories are connected, not that the people who bear them are reincarnations of each other. This is also given proof by the conundrum of Luisa and Cavendish.
Some people bypass this saying that Luisa is a fictional character in the Half-Lives manuscript. So I prefer thinking that the six main characters are not reincarnations of the same person, but simply occurrences of the same soul. Together the individual narratives create a picture of a world where the wrongs committed in a past life can be redeemed in the next.
In each story, one character has the indicative birthmark shaped like a comet, signifying that this is the same soul reincarnated in another time. Throughout my reading I found myself tracking the characters with the birthmark and paying attention to their development over time. The stories themselves are written like a matryoshka doll a Russian nesting doll breaking apart in the middle to reveal a hidden story within.
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