“No Man is an Island”: Tracing Functions of Insular Landscapes in David Mitchell’s Fiction

Abstract

Islands are a powerful recurring motif in the writing of David Mitchell. His globe-trotting fictions negotiate the trope of ‘islandness’ as ambiguously positioned between desire and hostility, stranding protagonists on bountiful shores or dooming them in squalid insular exiles. As seemingly contained spaces detached from the centres of the world, islands are malleable platforms for the projection of literary experimentation. In David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Cloud Atlas (2004), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and The Bone Clocks (2014), islands become utopian imaginaries, sanctuaries for the outcast, sources and tools of power and sites of corruption and entrapment, while constantly mediating between reality and the imagination, the past and the future. First and foremost, however, the analysis of the functions of islands in Mitchell’s work informed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Michel de Certeau’s conceptual frameworks of ‘place’ and ‘space’ reveals that, much like the author’s many individual stories, islands are never isolated, but always relational entities enabling protagonists to interact with one another and become interconnected with the larger world around them. If we want to understand how deeply topography, spatiality and identity are interwoven in Mitchell’s work, we cannot circumvent his islands.