Atonement: Summary of notes, Contemporary Literature
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Course
Contemporary Literature (CONTEMPORARYLITERATURE)
Institution
University Of Athens
Book
Atonement
A summary of notes on the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan. It can be said that the novel pertains to three key categories: it is a postmodern, historiographic, metafictional novel. Each of these categories bestows the text with specific elements, whose complex combination makes it such an exceptional...
Ian McEwan is one of the finest authors of his generation. His work Atonement is highly
acclaimed and was a “watershed” in his literary career because it marked a progression from his earlier
obsession with the perverse, the grotesque, and the macabre.
In Atonement, we read the voice of an elderly novelist, in 1990, writing the perspective of her own younger
self first in 1935 and then 1940. Her story hinges on a crucial error of perception, with which she destroys
the harmony of her childhood home. The atonement to which the title refers becomes the goal of her life
and her text. As she struggles somehow to make amends for the irrevocable damage that she has caused,
the dark ambiguities of the book call into question the very possibility of achieving such grace, and express
a troubled awareness of the complexities of responsibility and agency - in writing as in life.
It can be said that the novel pertains to three key categories: it is a postmodern, historiographic,
metafictional novel. Each of these categories bestows the text with specific elements, whose complex
combination makes it such an exceptional work.
As a metafictional novel, it openly concerned with “the making of fiction” and storytelling in general. It is
intensely self-conscious and focuses on how reality is modeled after fiction and the opposite. The
protagonist, Briony Tallis, is a 13 year old girl with an uncontrollable urge to become a renowned writer.
Her childish mindset is fouled with this unrestrained, yet very conscious, literary ambition, so that we
watch her constant conflict between reality and her personal embellishment of it. Her effort to clear the
blur line between fact and fiction, gives rise to several metafictional moments. As the story advances,
McEwan show how “narration is in fact interpretation” and moreover how interpretation can easily turn to
misinterpretation, which is another theme of the novel. With the Jamesian seminal scene of the two figures
by the fountain, McEwan underlines the subjectivity in point of view and makes obvious how different
realities can lead to contrasting viewpoints. He also suggests that more often than not, the cause of
misinterpretation is the failure of imagination. For McEwan the ability to imagine how it feels to be like
someone else, is crucial to one’s moral sense. Therefore, failure of imagination leads to failure of empathy.
What Briony experiences with Robbie and Cecilia, either by the fountain or in the darkened library, and
then with the rape of Lola, she channels it, as always, with her self-absorbed focus on her development as
a writer, thus any gaps her melodramatic thought finds in the story, she tries to fill with her imagination.
However what she experienced was beyond the traditional order she was accustomed with, and the moral
binarisms it inflicted were more complex so she had to label it - on her own terms- in order to understand
it. Eventually, Briony’s indictment o f Robbie is caused by her exaggerated sense of her own interpretative
powers as a neophyte author. As she gets older she realizes the wrong she did and through her writing
tries to make amend for it, to atone. When she publishes the book she pleads for our sympathy claiming
that she has now understood the importance of respecting others’ autonomy and that her matures artistic
expression has allowed her to imaginatively put herself in the position of other people. The granting of her
atonement though is doubtful. Throughout the novel her desire to atone contradicts her ongoing, godlike
exertion of her authorial power.
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