A common philosophical question debates the reality of free will versus destined fate, and if both can exist simultaneously. Cloud Atlas delves into this topic by presenting us with multiple stories, varying in time periods and people.  There seems an existence of two souls, two entities that keep being brought back together, in various forms, genders, and relationships. Although these souls keep resurfacing and debatably have destined, dictated lives, they also have the ability to make choices, thus exercising free will in a destined path.

            One story accounts of Timothy Cavendish; a man tricked by his brothers into checking into a nursery home.  One day while playing a card game called “Patience”, Cavendish realizes, “the outcome is decided not during the course of the play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins” (368). This realization reflects the ideal that everything in the course of a life is dictated by a plan and a destiny. This idea argues everything is predetermined, and although people may feel as though they are making decisions, the outcome has already been decided.

            This ideal is explicitly opposed in the incidence of Luisa Rey and Joe Napier. Joe decides to escape after retiring from the controversy at Seaboard. Knowing that Luisa Rey is in trouble, he comes bank to help and save her from her death in the bombing of Third Bank in California. Luisa tells Joe, ‘”I feel […] that I-no, that you-broke some sort of decree back there. As if Buenas Yerbas had decided I was to die today. But here I am” (428). Here there is a suspicious notion that Luisa Rey should not (according to her fate), be alive at this point, but because Joe Napier made the decision to come back to save her, she remained alive.

 Joe Napier had had a guilty conscious leaving Luisa Rey in danger because he had known Luisa Rey’s father from earlier on in his career. They had both been cops called to duty in a shootout. Luisa Rey’s father had been running by Joe when a grenade had been thrown in Joe’s general vicinity. Joe account’s Luisa Rey’s father kicking the grenade away, saving Joe’s life, but taking his own. Towards the end of the novel, Luisa Rey and Joe Napier find themselves in the face of death when Bill Smokes finds and points his gun towards them on the Starfish. Smoke kills Joe, but before he can get to Luisa, Joe, in return, kills Smokes.

Both Luisa Rey's father’s and Joe Napier’s act changed the fate of people in the novel.  Luisa Rey’s affecting Napier’s fate, while Napier affecting Luisa Rey’s. This goes to show that although there may be a destiny, that isn’t to say it cannot be changed.

Cavendish believed that the game had been determined when the cards had been shuffled, before the game had even begun. But this isn’t to say you have no say in the way you play your cards. This novel argues that both free will and predetermined destiny can coexist and regularly effect and regulate each other.