ABSTRACT
A number of David Mitchell's novels have drawn on the principle of the short story cycle, or, more specifically, of what Elke D'hoker and Bart Van den Bossche describe as short story collection, a term that aims to allow also for cross-generic influence. This chapter explains how the individual episodes/chapters/short narratives in The Bone Clocks create a network of references between each other. In Mitchell, readers frequently move beyond conventionalized frames: the temporality clearly extends outside the contemporary, and the localities make global claims, as exemplified by the author in previous works such as Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas. Ishiguro and Murakami stand as two writers whose take on form invited Mitchell to conceive of narrative prose fiction as a literary field that allows for a broad range of authorial inventiveness and for a sizeable dose of the kind of generic self-fashioning that brings into being formal innovation.
