Form the passage above, aside from finding out that the narrator of the second story is an overt narrator; it further confirms that the narrator of the story
is also a limited first person narrator who narrates the story through an internal point of view.
b. Narrative Level
For a story to have a multiple narrative level there should be a character in the extradiegetic level that becomes a secondary narrator. There is no character in
the second story who takes the role of a secondary narrator. Hence, because there is no secondary narrator, there is no embedded narrative or multiple narrative
levels either. 3.
“Half-Live: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”
“Half-Live: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” is the third story that is told in Cloud Atlas. The analysis of the first story is divided into two parts. The first part
is an analysis of the point of view and narrator of the story and the second part is the analysis of the narrative level of the story.
a. Point of View and Narrator
This story has a different point of view and narrator from other stories inside Cloud Atlas. Half-Life is narrated by an external third person narrator.
Throughout the stories the narrator changes the focalizer of the story and divides each change with a subchapter.
Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening. No reply. Just vague submarine noises.
Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch . . .” There isn‟t. She peels up the carpet
–a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.” “Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn‟t dead?”
Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month‟s brownout lasted seven hours.” Well, at least I’m not confined with a
psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga.
4
Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to Illustrated Planet in 1967
to read your father‟s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective.
I‟m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation. Mitchell, 2012:92.
From the quotation above it can be seen that at the first part before the subchapter separator the focalizer is Luisa Rey while on the second part the
focalizer is Rufus Sixsmith. The narrator describes the events through the point of view of Rey and Sixsmith and the narrator also knows the inner thought and
feeling of the characters that he or she uses as the focalizer. It can also be seen that the narrator is an external third person narrator
since the narrator exists outside the story world and the narrator addresses the characters inside the story by their names and third person pronoun. Another
evidence of this fact is shown in the quotation below. As she crosses the bridge, the Swannekke B plant emerges from behind the
older, grayer cooling towers of Swannekke A. Once again, Luisa wonders about Rufus Sixsmith.
Why wouldn’t he give me a contact number? Scientists can’t be telephobic. Why did no one in the super’s office in his
apartment building even know his name? Scientists can’t have aliases. Twenty minutes later Luisa arrives at a colony of some two hundred
luxury homes overlooking a sheltered bay. A hotel and golf course share the semiwooded slope below the power station. She leaves her Beetle in
