43 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanAtonement
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Need for Atonement
Most of the characters in Atonement feel a need to atone for their mistakes. However, not all of these mistakes are of the same magnitude. Robbie and Cecilia feel the need to atone for their mistake of failed communication. After years of unresolved romantic feelings for one another, their relationship explodes in dramatic fashion. Robbie and Cecilia realize that they have made a mistake by not acknowledging their love sooner, so the intensity of their love is an act of atonement: They are making up for lost time by loving each other even more intensely.
After making her false accusation, Briony’s entire life becomes a quest for atonement. She grows up, matures, and realizes that what she did to Robbie and her sister was wrong. The young aspiring writer believed that she thoroughly understood the world around her but, as she grows, she realizes the depth of her mistake. When the horror of the situation dawns on her, she begins to deny herself pleasures as a form of self-chastening. She changes the course that she had always planned for herself when she turns down the opportunity to attend Cambridge University, a decision which hampers her ambition to become a writer in the future. She drastically reduces her writing, denying herself her the activities she loves most. By becoming a nurse, Briony is attempting to atone for her crimes by giving back to society, following in her older sister’s footsteps. She hopes that, at least symbolically, this choice will bring her closer to Cecilia, but in the end, it does not.
Briony realizes that she cannot return the time that she has denied Robbie and Cecilia. She stops modelling her life on Cecilia and forges a different future, which, coincidentally, is a future comprised of the past. Briony uses her skills as a writer to atone for her mistakes, creating an alternative, fictional world in which she can give back everything that was lost. Her original sin was a story she came to believe so fully that she manifested it into existence. The novel is an attempt to do the same, but with a positive outcome. The little girl who invented a story that ruined so many lives tries to invent another story to atone for her mistake.
Family Patterns of Flawed Communication
Many of the problems experienced by the Tallis family can be attributed to a failure to communicate. Such communication failures can be traced back to the parents, Jack and Emily. The marriage between Emily and Jack is rife with unspoken problems. Emily does not approve of Jack’s dedication to helping Robbie’s education, and she quietly seethes at the suspicion that he is having an affair during his regular trips to London. However, she never tells her husband about any of her problems. Conversely, Jack is a ghostly presence in the novel. He is not present for pivotal moments of his family’s history and is unable to speak or listen to his wife and children. Jack’s physical and emotional distance discourages Emily from confronting him, and she opts to suffer in silence. Her dedication to stoicism creates an atmosphere in which the children learn not to share their emotions. Her example teaches them to suffer in silence so as to appear strong and stable. The children inherit their parents’ tendency to ignore issues and allow them to fester until they become untenable.
Cecilia inherits her mother’s emotional repression. As such, she lacks the tools to really understand her feelings toward Robbie. On the morning of Leon’s arrival, she argues with Robbie out of frustration with herself. She is certain that she should not speak to him directly because her personality is like her mother’s. Robbie is not a Tallis, but he was raised in parallel to the Tallis children. As a result, he shares many of Cecilia’s communication issues, but the outside influence of his mother and his university experience allows him to realize that he loves Cecilia. Ironically, by sending the wrong letter to Cecilia, he is committing an act of miscommunication, but one which proves to be successful to some degree. The letter is shocking enough to penetrate Cecilia’s repression and jolt her into a realization about her feelings. Unfortunately for Cecilia and Robbie, others read the letter, which wrongly incriminates Robbie. The means by which they overcome their communication failure also dooms them.
The meeting between Briony, Cecilia, and Robbie in London is another example of failed communication. After Cecilia does not respond to her letters, Briony overcomes the imposed silence by arriving at Cecilia’s home. Her presence shows a willingness to communicate, but once she is inside, she begins to understand how differently they see the world. Robbie is still furious with her and only Cecilia is able to calm him, whispering in his ear using a language that they have developed on their own, away from the emotional repression of the Tallis family. When Robbie shouts at Briony, she wants to defend herself, but she knows that whatever she says will only anger him further. She remains silent, communicating her more mature understanding of the world by choosing to say nothing to the man who she imprisoned with her stories. To atone, Briony agrees to write letters to the family and to speak to lawyers as a way of communicating Robbie’s innocence. Unfortunately, this scene is an invention. The older Briony understands her family’s struggles to communicate; only in invented scenes are they able to finally say what should have been said many years ago.
Metafiction and Impact of Storytelling on Reality
Atonement is an example of metafiction in that the novel is concerned with the invention and spread of stories, while also containing an awareness of its own fictional nature. Metafiction is a literary term that refers to novels and other forms of fiction that demonstrate an awareness of their own literary, fictional, or artificial nature. Briony is the focus in the novel’s metafiction. From a young age, she is certain that she is a writer and that her literary talents give her insight into the world that is denied to most of her peers. Briony realizes the power of storytelling early in her life and weaponizes it when she decides to accuse Robbie of rape.
After acknowledging her error many years later, Briony begins to rewrite her story. Throughout her life, she has come to understand the world by reducing it to characters that she can manipulate. By rewriting, editing, and changing her stories, she improves her understanding of others’ motivations. The character she understands the least, however, is herself. The more Briony writes, the more she begins to understand her mistakes. The events of that fateful day become the main story of her life. She writes and rewrites the story, using fiction as a way to improve her understanding of what actually took place. The more she writes, the more horrified she becomes. Because Briony does not truly understand the events until much later in her life, none of the stories she produced feel authentic or complete. Her story’s rejection from the literary magazine reveals that her story’s faults reflect her inner struggle. The retelling, rewriting, and criticism of the story is a metafictional extension of the way in which Briony is wrestling with her guilt and trying to understand the ramifications of what she has done.
By the end of the novel, Briony reveals that the story is finally complete. The story she has spent decades trying to write is Atonement. Foregrounding the main narrative as a fiction within a fiction, McEwan changes the reader’s assumptions of the text they have encountered: He poses the question of what changes when the reader perceives the fictional story they are reading as having been fictionalized in a way they do not expect. Metafiction interrupts the willful suspension of disbelief, making it impossible for the reader to dissolve the barriers between fiction and reality. Since McEwan is the author of Briony’s story, the question arises as to whether Briony, a fictional character, has the power to atone for an act she technically did not commit. Just as Briony invents a story about Robbie, McEwan is inventing a story about Briony. The only non-invented element of the novel is the war. Neither McEwan nor Briony has the ability to change the devastation World War II caused in the real world or alter the fates of real people who, like Cecilia and Robbie, were never able to fulfill their dreams. Atonement asks whether atonement is possible for individuals and for society on a larger scale once injustice has ended someone’s life.
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