Within our culture today, a familiar, friendly and comfortable environment is present for many. Yet, we also experience the uncanny, a feeling that occurs when something that was once familiar to us and brought a sense of comfort, becomes terrifyingly unfamiliar due to a change in context. In the book Cloud Atlas, from the chapter Somni-451, written by David Mitchell, the focus is on the character Somni-451, an ascending fabricant whose life drastically changes when she begins to deviate from the life planned out for her. Throughout this chapter, Somni-451 goes through many transitions in which she is taken from Papa Song’s restaurant where she lived and worked all of her life, never knowing anything about the outside world. The feeling of uncanny manifests within the story when Somni-451 first sees the diner at night, later when she sees it after having been away for some time, and when she finds…show more content… All her life, while she was living in the restaurant, she was shown a video of her sisters boarding a ship to Hawaii, where they would arrive at Xulation and be “transformed into consumers with soulrings” (Mitchell 186). Her friend Hae-Joo takes her to the ship, where she witnesses her sisters joyfully walk into their own death, unknowingly. A “helmet was fitted over the Somni’s head and neck…the servers head slumped unnaturally” (Mitchell 342). What was once familiar to her, a future she had once looked forward to, became terrifyingly unfamiliar. For as long as she can remember, she had felt joy as she watched the Xulation video from within her home at Papa Song’s, but as she ascended, she said that she began to notice that “scenes of Xulation repeated themselves” (Mitchell 344). Looking back at the life that she once lived, not only has Somni-451’s home become unfamiliar to her, so has the future that she was promised while living in that