Paired Texts plan – Atonement & The Lives of Others
Copy this table and complete with as many detailed & significant connections as possible including textual references
“Ground” for
comparison
sociocultural and
situational contexts
Text 1
Text 2
Atonement
The Lives of Others
British Middle Class during the Empire’s 20th C. decline – 1930’s to 1999
Set in 1984 at the height of East Germany’s communist GDR repression of
political freedom & surveillance of its citizens, the film comments obliquely
on post-Berlin Wall ‘Ostalgie’ for the East, through its documentary realist
style.
The story is centred on the Tallis family, who represent the degeneracy of
Britain’s aristocracy in particular and the class system in general. Jack Tallis’
patronage of Robbie foreshadows the broader social changes of the century
which will lead to Briony’s West Indian taxi driver at the novel’s end – a postgraduate student at the LSE, whose social and professional prospects in 1999
are even brighter, without class patronage (ironically echoed by Briony’s
assumptions about him) than Robbie’s were in the 1930’s.
Writing at the end of the millennium, McEwan looks back at both the long
history of the novel as a literary genre and the 20th C’s shorter history of
Modernism as a movement that attempted to renovate the novel as a form for
representing and making sense of the human condition. Atonement seems to
view both of these as failures, symbolised by the macrocosm of WWII – a
political failure of modernism’s promise of a ‘brave new world’ – and the
microcosm of Briony’s attempt to atone for her childhood error through the
novelist’s art, initially in the problematic form of the classic realist novel.
Protagonist’s (and
other characters’)
‘journey’
textual references
Briony’s = as putative author of the novel and thus the only character who
holds the entire narrative together, Briony’s journey of atonement
is its raison d’etre. Her relationship with the two lovers, Robbie &
Cecilia, provides the novel’s moral centre and connects McEwan’s
critiques of Modernism and the classic realist novel, both as
failures of the imagination, with the doomed love affair that had
been a cliché from Thomas Hardy to D.H. Lawrence.
Robbie’s = beginning as a cliché of aspiration like Charles Dickens’ Pip from
Great Expectations, his imaginary journey at the hands of Briony
the author becomes a metaphor for all the failed promise of the 20th
C. As a projection of Briony’s imagination, he also represents her
greatest achievement of imagining herself into the feelings of
others. NB: Robbie’s journey towards Dunkirk in Part Two, as a
return to Cecilia and exposé of war’s evils, echoes Amir’s return to
Afghanistan, where his rescue of Sohrab acts as both an indictment
of the nation’s civil wars and a rehabilitation of Hassan’s legacy.
The story is centred on an artistic couple – successful playwright & committed
socialist Georg Dreyman and his lover, renowned actress Christa-Maria
Sieland – whose position in society is threatened by the attentions of Minister
Hempf, a party official who uses his power to break them up in order to
maintain his ongoing affair with the actress.
Von Donnersmarck imagines the ‘one good man’ who could have resisted the
state through the character of expert Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler. His surveillance
of Dreyman and Sieland becomes the catalyst for a personal transformation in
rejecting the corrupt values of the police state. The film embodies various
forms of atonement, from Wiesler’s repudiation of the system he has served so
faithfully, through Sieland’s suicide to Dreyman’s publication of his novel
Sonata for a Good Man.
Cecilia’s = from the awkward, slightly snobbish and self-important young
woman of Part One, she grows up through suffering – separated
from Robbie, alienated from her parents, despising her once-loved
sister and living the hard life of a nurse in wartime. There is no
space for a spoilt, upper-middle class ingénue. As a projection of
the older Briony’s desire to mould her to her own purpose, none of
the younger Cecilia’s faults is in evidence in Part Three: a nearperfect character for posterity atoning for Briony’s sin.
Lola’s = as an allusion to two eponymous heroines – parodying Richardson’s
Clarissa with her name echoing Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita –
Lola’s social advancement stands as a morally bankrupt foil to
Robbie’s failure.
Paul Marshall =
Psychological
insights
Briony’s rewriting of the novel again and again is her act of atonement for her
crime of bearing false witness against Robbie that wrecks his and Cecilia’s
lives. But her lifetime of guilt needs to be moderated by her original youth,
innocent (though foolish) motives and lack of any real opportunity to retract
her evidence once adults had begun to act on her original statement. Her guilt
must also be shared by Paul Marshall, the actual perpetrator who also lets an
innocent man pay for his crime; Lola for remaining silent to escape the
humiliation and difficulty of accusing Paul (or accounting for herself, if she
was a willing partner); and Briony’s family, the police and other experts who
know her and should recognise her love of drama and need to be the centre of
attention make it very difficult for her to relinquish the position she has won
by her certainty. Yet Briony cannot be completely absolved. When given the
clearest opportunity to change her evidence, she refuses it: ‘Yes, I saw him. I
saw him.’ (p.181)
The war in the novel extends guilt to the whole of society. As the most
destructive event in human history, WW2 sees Robbie, the most guiltless of
characters, reflect on his own guilt. The span of the novel has seen ‘First his
own life ruined, then everybody else’s’ (p.217). No one remains innocent.
‘Everyone was guilty, and no one was … there weren’t enough people,
enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the
statements of all the witnesses and gather the facts. The witnesses were guilty
too.’ (p.216) It is a stark message of social responsibility, as relevant to the
time of McEwan writing as it is to when Robbie is speaking. The fragile peace
of Europe, patched together at after WW1, has been shattered. Guilt extends
backwards in time, as well as forwards. When Betty is blamed for breaking
Uncle Clem’s vase, we know it was not her fault. It, too, had been pieced
together inexpertly. But many of the novel’s small acts of guilt are sins of
omission, of staying silent: Emily is guilty of neglecting Briony and of neither
searching for the twins nor calling the police; Lola is guilty of keeping silent;
Cecilia is guilty of hiding her breaking of the vase; Robbie, largely set apart
from this general trend of guilt through inactivity by his tendency to decisive
action, is almost guilty of doing nothing to save the RAF man, but is
redeemed by Mace prompting him. The message extends to all of society, then
and now: ‘You’ve killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?’
(p.261)
More important than guilt to the novel, but curiously implicated by it, is love.
Briony’s family is largely dysfunctional. Emily says she loves her children,
but it is an ineffectual love, never visibly resulting in any benefit or care.
Briony and Cecilia love each other, but their love is squandered and destroyed
by inappropriate actions. Cecilia adores and admires Leon at the start, but
realises later that he is spineless and superficial. The only love left is the core
loves of Cecilia and Robbie, which nothing can alter. It is Robbie’s love for
Cecilia that keeps him alive in prison and in France. There is, for him, only
love or oblivion.
The change in Robbie and Cecilia’s relationship from friends to lovers begins
in awkwardness and antagonism. Their episode of passion is so intense it is
aggressive, and the description of the sex is astonishingly eloquent and
sensual. But there is embarrassment, fumbling, and Briony’s interruption,
which adds bathos. The lovers’ heightened sensual awareness during dinner
keeps the emotional charge and tension alive, extending it for hours. By the
time the lovers are seen together again in Part Three their love has the weight
of worldly experience behind it and has been hard won through years of
waiting and suffering. It also has a purpose and immense strength. They have
earned the right to compare themselves with the great lovers of history, recited
in their letters of Part Two (‘In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing
fountain start.’ p.242 is Robbie quoting from W. H. Auden’s 1940 poem “In
Memory of W. B. Yeats”). NB: While almost a minor subplot in The Kite
Runner, Amir’s marriage to Soraya is given equivalent literary (and ironic)
allusions, to Rostam and Tamineh.
Cecilia’s love draws Robbie back from the brink when he wants to hit Briony,
just as it once used to bring Briony back from the brink of childhood
nightmares. It is, Briony acknowledges at the end, unbearable that such love
should not find fulfilment. She cannot allow Cecilia and Robbie to die, as she
suggests they did in ‘real life’, but makes their love transcend death by writing
a happy ending. Their love is not diminished in any way if they do not
survive, but it is tragically wasted.
Is Briony being idealistic in bringing Robbie and Cecilia together happily?
We might wonder how much chance this relationship would really have,
limited as it was to a single episode of interrupted love-making and then an
extended correspondence from prison. McEwan confronts this issue head on
in the tea Robbie and Cecilia share in London before he goes to war. But in
the end it barely matters whether they could have lived happily ever after.
Their story has become a fiction, but also an atonement and a tribute. As
Briony says, they would all be forgotten anyway, without the book, and then
what difference would it make what ‘really happened’ (p.371)? The novel –
hers and McEwan’s – stands as testament to love, and in that it deserves the
ending which best suits its enduring purpose.
In a novel that claims to be constructed from events remembered from the
past, memory is closely entwined with the truth. Has Briony remembered
accurately? If she has made up details, is she lying? Whether fiction lies has a
long philosophical history. Sometimes, she steps in as narrator and
acknowledges that she does not remember: ‘it was not the long-ago morning
she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it’ (p.41). There are
many lapses of memory and failures of understanding. The French boy, Luc
Cornet, believes Briony is his French girlfriend. Briony answers his question
by confirming that she loves him, as no other answer is possible and at that
moment she does. It is both true and untrue. Robbie, delirious in France,
imagines and recalls things that are not real. Emily wrongly thinks that Paul
Marshall is good with children. Cecilia and Robbie are convinced that Danny
Hardman was really the rapist.
In the end, the truth a novel tells is a truth about, and distilled from, human
experience and therefore immeasurably more valuable than tiny technical
details.
[adapted from York Advanced Readers Guide to Atonement, by Anne Rooney]
Narrative and
stylistic form
textual references
Tripartite chronological structure with an epilogue – organised to reflect
movements in time and space and concentration on different characters
(focalisation). Symmetry resides in the pattern begining with all the
characters together at the Tallis house, with attention focused on Briony. Parts
Two and Three divide the narrative to focus on Robbie in France and Briony
in London, with Cecilia a shadowy presence in both. Finally, the stories come
together again to end back in the family house, with Briony at the centre and
the remaining surviving characters around her. Asymmetry occurs in Part
One’s half novel length and the short twenty page epilogue’s very different
status. The latter’s meta-narrative – an outer fiction enclosing all that has
come before – moves the novel’s preoccupation with truth to a new level of
complex ambiguity.
The divison of the main text into three parts allows McEwan to concentrate on
key moments in time and place without the need to fill gaps or account for
passing time. Rather than showing how Briony came to feel guilty, how
Robbie changed, or what Cecilia does in the meantime, we see what happened
and then are shown moments of what look like resolution. The epilogue
proves this to be a misrepresentation..
Part One is quite different from Parts Two and Three: in its division into
numbered chapters, unlike their continuous narratives with only slight pauses
to indicate scene changes or passing time; its varied focalisation or different
points of view contrasts with Robbie’s dominating Part Two and Briony’s
dominating Part Three and the epilogue.
The multiple voices that crowd Part One also give this part its elusive, hazy
quality as if shimmering through a heat haze with indistinct edges, where little
can be pinned down. Little is happening and nothing is seen head-on, but
glimpsed or recalled later: the rape is a key example, not even seen by Briony.
The structure is deceptive. Before we read the epilogue, it looks as though the
novel has presented an event then the key points that lead towards its
resolution: Robbie’s survival in France and Briony growing up enough to face
a meeting with the lovers where they will start the process of mending the
damage done. By denying that this is what happened, the epilogue wrenches
the structure out of shape and pulls the two stories apart so that Robbie’s and
Cecilia’s endings are split between parts of the novel and between England
and France. This messy, frustrating lack of resolution is the very thing Briony
tried to avoid in her childhood stories.
Themes / motifs:
1.
Love & friendship
2.
Guilt
3.
Justice
4.
Time
5.
Betrayal
6.
Empathy
7.
Potential for
change \
metamorphosis &
growth
8.
textual references
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Taking a stand
against oblivion –
the persistence of
genuine human
contact through the
power of the
imagination.
Robbie’s & Cecilia’s relationship has all the hallmarks of a doomed passionate love. Grown
out of childhood familiarity and consummated in the heat of young adulthood, they are
separated by fate almost as soon as they recognise each other’s true feelings. Through
Briony’s imagination, their love sustains them through the separation of prison and war. Her
part in their reunion is to smooth over the pain caused by her false witness, ending in a
memory of Cecilia calming her nightmares: ‘Come back. It was only a bad dream, Briony,
come back.’ (p.349). The view of the lovers through the perceptions of a child makes them
highly ambiguous: initially causing their tragic separation, Briony’s romantic atonement
seeks to reunite them in fiction.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Robbie’s & Cecilia’s relationship has all the hallmarks of a doomed passionate love. Grown
out of childhood familiarity and consummated in the heat of young adulthood, they are
separated by fate almost as soon as they recognise each other’s true feelings. Through
Briony’s imagination, their love sustains them through the separation of prison and war. Her
part in their reunion is to smooth over the pain caused by her false witness, ending in a
memory of Cecilia calming her nightmares: ‘Come back. It was only a bad dream, Briony,
come back.’ (p.349). The view of the lovers through the perceptions of a child makes them
highly ambiguous: initially causing their tragic separation, Briony’s romantic atonement
seeks to reunite them in fiction.