Empathy & the Novel
in Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
Saving the world, one pointof-view at a time.

At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a
tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue,
was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was
doomed.
Ian McEwan, Atonement

’Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions
you have entertained. What have you been judging from? …what
ideas have you been admitting?’
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Atonement: a tragicomedy of failed
remarriage
’…the genre of remarriage is an inheritor of the preoccupations and
discoveries of Shakespearian romantic comedy.’ Stanley Cavell

Settings
1.
2.
3.
4.

Part One: Hottest day of 1935
Part Two: World War 2 – Dunkirk, 1940
Part Three: World War 2 – London, 1940
Epilogue: London, 1999
Literary models


Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1817); Clarissa (Samuel
Richardson, 1748); What Maisie Knew (Henry James, 1897);
The Go-Between (L. P. Hartley, 1953); The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (John Fowles, 1969)
Literary allusions

Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare, 1601); Lady Chatterly’s
Lover (D. H. Lawrence, 1928); “In Memory of W. B. Yeats“ (W.
H. Auden, 1940)
Atonement: a posthumous novel
About the author:

Briony Tallis was born in Surrey in 1922, the daughter of a senior civil
servant. She attended Roedean School, and in 1940 trained to become
a nurse. Her wartime nursing experience provided the material for her
first novel, Alice Riding, published in 1948 and winner of that year’s
Fitzrovia Prize for fiction. Her second novel, Soho Solstice, was praised
by Elizabeth Bowen as “a dark gem of psychological acuity,” while
Graham Greene described her as “one of the more interesting talents to
have emerged since the war.” Other novels and short-story collections
consolidated her reputation during the fifties. In 1962 she published A
Barn in Steventon, a study of domestic theatricals in Jane Austen’s
childhood. Tallis’s sixth novel, The Ducking Stool, was a best-seller in
1965 and was made into a successful film starring Julie Christie.
Thereafter, Briony Tallis’s reputation went into decline, until the Virago
imprint made her work available to a younger generation in the late
seventies. She died in July 2001.
anachrony [an-ak-rôni]

A term used in modern narratology to
denote a discrepancy between the order in
which events of the story occur and the
order in which they are presented to us in
the plot.
Adjective: anachronic

Anachronic narrative takes two basic
forms:

‘flashback’ or analepsis

‘flash-forward’ or prolepsis.
focalisation

The term used in modern narratology for
‘point of view’; that is, for the kind of
perspective from which the events of a
story are witnessed. Events observed by a
traditional omniscient narrator are said to
be non-focalised, whereas events
witnessed within the story’s world from the
constrained perspective of a single
character are ‘internally focalised’.
focalisation
The nature of a given narrative’s
focalisation is to be distinguished from its
narrative ‘voice’, as seeing is from
speaking.
 The events of Atonement are ‘internally
focalised’ in incredibly subtle ways through
the many narrative voices of its
characters, particularly Briony, Robbie and
Cecilia.

Narrative technique

McEwan’s use of focalisation complicates
the authorial partiality of a Jane Austen
novel, when the ‘omniscient narrator’ of
the older Briony-as-author, compromised
by her need for atonement, can no longer
be seen as non-focalised.
Narrative technique

McEwan employs this particular ‘modal
determination’ for two reasons:
 to
distinguish his narrative from the classic
realist novel’s association with an omniscient
narrator (Briony’s lie came from positioning
herself as such a narrator in her fictionalised
scenario of events)
 to demonstrate Briony-as-the-adult-narrator’s
attempt to project herself into the thoughts
and feelings of her characters, an act crucial
to her search for forgiveness.
Metafiction: self-reflexive texts
Fiction about fiction; or more especially a
kind of fiction that openly comments on its
own fictional status.
 Atonement draws attention to its own
construction as a fictional narrative
because such an awareness is crucial to
its ’truths’ about the human condition.

Critical reading of a narrative
sequence

Atonement Part Three
(p.312):
 ‘We
found Two Figures…’
to ‘Development is required.’
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence

Atonement Part Three (p.312):
 Cyril
Connolly’s letter is an odd interpolation in the
narrative – the first time the novel turns on itself,
creating a sense of dislocation that makes us pause
to reflect on the process of writing and the whole
artificial construct: a product of drafting and redrafting,
criticism and adaptation. His recommendation for an
‘underlying pull of simple narrative’ is already there in
the vase episode, because Briony’s observation of it
does now lead somewhere.
Against Oblivion

No late twentieth century text can subscribe to
the simplified wish fulfilments of classic realist
fiction. ‘The development of nuclear weapons,’
McEwan has said, ‘shows the dissociation of
science from feelings,’ of outer and inner worlds
we inhabit.

Interview with John Haffenden (1985), quoted in Brian Finney’s essay
“Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement“ (2002)
Against Oblivion – Atonement

World War Two, that introduced the world to mass ethnic
cleansing, the Cold War and the permanent threat of
nuclear deterrence, appears to have brought forth mainly
aesthetic structures that reflect the complexity and horror
of life in the second half of that century. It is a time in
history when the Marshalls, who, equally guilty, lack
Briony’s conscience, use the War to make their fortune
and are then treated as public benefactors. Compared to
Briony, they “have no remorse, no need for atonement“
(McEwan, 2002 interview).

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Against Oblivion – Atonement

Atonement ends not just with the revelation of the deaths
of Robbie and Cecilia, but with the diagnosis of Briony’s
vascular dementia and her refusal to have the lovers
forgive her even in her fictional account of their survival proof that in her literary act of atonement Briony has
finally learned how to imagine herself into the feelings of
others. Responding to the criticism that his endings are
too pessimistic, McEwan has said, “I never did trust
those novels where, for all their dark insights, or that
they ended in a funeral, there was always someone
walking away and bending to pick up a flower“ (2001
interview).

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html

Yet, as McEwan admits, Part Three “has about it
both an act of cowardice [. . .] but also it’s her
stand against oblivion she’s seventy seven
years old, her tide is running out very fast [. . .]
She does not have the courage of her
pessimism. [. . .] She knows that when this novel
is finally published [. . .] she herself will only
become a character“ (McEwan, Silverblatt).

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html

Is Briony’s work of fiction an evasion or an act of
atonement or both? What exactly does she
mean when she says that atonement “was
always an impossible task, and that was
precisely the point” (351)? Is she implicitly
recognizing the contradiction at the heart of her
narrative – the impossibility of avoiding
constructing false fictions around others at the
same time as one is required to enter
imaginatively into their lives?

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html

Or is McEwan suggesting that the attempt is all
we can ask for, an attempt that is bound to fail,
but that can come closer to or stray further from
the reality of others? Robbie’s and Cecilia’s
happiness cannot be restored to them by an act
of corrective fiction.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)

http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html

Nevertheless the attempt to imagine the feelings
of others is perhaps the one corrective that we
can make in the face of continuing human
suffering. The novel ends on a note of ambiguity.
Yet an appreciation of ambiguity is just what
would have prevented Briony from indicting
Robbie in her first fictionalized narration of these
events.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
What is really wrong with the
classic realist novel?
In classic realist fiction the events seem to
narrate themselves, thus removing any
sense of the literary work as a product of a
controlling voice.
 Discourse – language that draws attention
to its production – assumes a speaker and
a hearer, thus opening itself to resistance,
dispute, critical questioning.

What is really wrong with the
classic realist novel?

From his earliest collections of short stories Ian
McEwan has consistently drawn attention to the
status of his fiction as discourse by alluding to or
parodying traditional literary genres, thereby
forcing the reader to take note of the presence of
a self conscious narrator.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel

McEwan consciously modelled Atonement on
the work of “Elizabeth Bowen of The Heat of the
Day, with a dash of Rosamund Lehmann of
Dusty Answer, and, in [Briony’s] first attempts, a
sprinkling of Virginia Woolf” (McEwan, Begley
56). At least one reviewer has seen a parallel
between Atonement and Bowen’s The Last
September (1929) “with its restive teenage girl in
the big house” (Lee 16).

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel

Elizabeth Bowen also directly influences the form the
final novel takes. After reading Briony’s first neomodernist attempt to give fictional shape to the events of
1935 submitted to Cyril Connolly at Horizon, Bowen
reacts by first thinking the prose “ ‘too full, too cloying,’”
but with “‘redeeming shades of Dusty Answer’”
(Rosamund Lehmann’s first novel of 1927 about a young
girl’s growing up). Cyril Connolly voices Bowen’s final
criticism of the modernist obsession with consciousness
at the expense of plot by reminding Briony that even her
most sophisticated readers “retain a childlike desire to be
told a story” (296). Briony’s rewritten Part One owes its
mounting tension to Bowen’s criticism passed on to Cyril
Connolly and the example offered by Bowen’s earlier
novel.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel

The numerous allusions to other texts warn the reader
not to treat Atonement as a classic realist text. …
Atonement offers particularly clear instances of … the
different ways in which a text, in relating to other texts,
becomes productive of further meanings, ways such as
rereading and displacement. McEwan’s novel is most
obviously a rereading of the classic realist novel of the
nineteenth century, just as it is a displacement of the
modernist novel, particularly as instanced in the fiction of
Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel: Clarissa

Atonement makes an ironic literary allusion to the early English
epistolary novel Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. Arabella, the
melodramatic heroine of the thirteen-year-old Briony’s playlet,
shares Clarissa’s sister’s name and thereby places “The Trials of
Arabella“ within a literary tradition of sentimentality and
sensationalism, while inevitably lacking the psychological complexity
of the original. Cecilia is spending the vacation after graduating at
Cambridge by reading Clarissa, which Robbie considers
psychologically subtle and she boring. Their disagreement over this
text helps determine the reader’s response to the rape which takes
place later the same day and which is sprung on the reader with
none of the lengthy preparation that Richardson provides.

Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
 http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
bildungsroman

The coming-of-age story involves the
maturation from child to adult by means of
a journey, typically defined by an
acquisition of education, which leads to a
confrontation of one’s past, recognition of
familial guilt and burdens, and finally, a
fuller awareness of one’s self and eventual
accommodation into society.
bildungsroman

Isabel Allende used the same genre in her
second novel Eva Luna to negotiate a
similar cultural cross-over between North
(Europeans) and South (Latin-Americans),
colonisers and colonised, etc. In her novel,
she used a Northern European character
displaced by war in parallel with its LatinAmerican protagonist, to enable multiple
crossings over the ‘colonial divide’.
bildungsroman

While McEwan’s use of the bildungsroman in
Atonement seems to be quite straightforward,
Briony’s particular maturation from child to adult
perfectly fitting every element of the genre, the
ambiguity of her relationship to narrative truth
upsets our easy acceptance of its ideology of
identity formation. Like the eponymous
protagonist of the classic film Citizen Kane, there
is more than one discrete Briony Tallis in the
novel.
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #2

Atonement Part One, Chapter 1 (pp.5-6):
 ‘But
hidden drawers…’ to ‘…when he was at
home.’
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #2

Atonement Part One, Chapter 1 (pp.5-6):
are ironies in Briony’s worry about
readers speculating on her self-representation
– we later discover that this is indeed the older
Briony writing about her younger self – and in
her assertion that ‘she did not have it in her to
be cruel’ (p.5), with such an ordered life
denying her the possibility of wrongdoing – she
manages to create chaos & destruction through
the very urge that seemingly prevents her from
wrongdoing: the urge to make everything neat.
 There
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #3

Atonement Part One,
Chapter 13 (pp.168-9):
 ‘As
early as the week…’ to
‘…would be put at risk.’
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #3

Atonement Part One, Chapter 13 (pp.168-9):
 The
extended investigation of the rape is compressed
into a short, vital passage of reflection. Briony’s doubts
about what she saw are acknowledged and we see the
process by which they were quashed at the time. The
image of the ‘glazed surface’ of her conviction with
‘hairline cracks’(p.168) recalls the Meissen vase, mended
so they’re barely visible. Both vase & Briony’s story will
come apart again later. The final image of the ‘bride-tobe’ (p.169) who has doubts before a wedding, prefigures
Lola’s wedding to Paul in Part Three & recalls the
marriage-centred plot of The Trials of Arabella, as well as
the unsatisfactory marriages of the novel so far.
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #4

Atonement Part One,
Chapter 3 (pp. 39-42):
 ‘The
sequence was illogical…’
to ‘…The writing could wait
until she was free.’
Birth of the author



Irony (‘how easy…to get everything wrong’;
p.39)
Prolepsis (‘Six decades later she would
describe…’; p.41)
Reflective metafiction (‘I watch myself watch
myself writing…’)
 this
explicit acknowledgement of bildungsroman
as an authorial device undermines its credibility
as narrative realism, even as it works to establish
Briony’s fundamental character flaw
Critical reading of a narrative
sequence #5

Atonement Part One, Chapter 14
(pp. 186-7):
 ‘It
should have ended there…’ to
‘…finally vanished into the whiteness.’
Narrating an ending

Part 1’s conclusion is filled with layered ironies: it should have
ended, but it effectively begins Briony’s journey of atonement;
wanting her mother but knowing she ‘wouldn’t come now’(p.184),
Briony witnesses Robbie’s mother coming for him instead; knowing
‘she had never loved her sister more than now’(p.186) [but not
knowing Cecilia would never return that love], Briony fails to show
the same empathy for Grace Turner. In fact, Briony’s pointed failure
as narrator to express any sympathy for the ‘characters’ in this
‘concluding drama’ (Robbie and Grace) renders the moment far
more poignantly than if she expressed it as she had just previously
done for Cecilia and herself. The empathy she describes on p.41
may have been achieved in the reader, but has taken ‘six decades’
to perfect. For now, Briony’s sympathy ‘vanishe[s] into the
whiteness’ of a blank page.
Narrative (architectural) motifs

Alongside his use of metafiction and intertextuality,
McEwan also draws attention to the constructed nature
of his narrative by employing parallel or symmetrical
motifs:

Marshall’s rape of Lola takes place by the eighteenth century,
crumbling, stuccoed Greek temple in the Tallis grounds with its
‘row of pillars and the pediment above them’ (72).

The wedding of Marshall and Lola turns out to be at a London
church that looks ‘like a Greek temple,’ especially its ‘low portico
with white columns beneath a clock tower of harmonious
proportions’ (323). Separated by five years, the rape and
marriage are brought into shocking juxtaposition by purely
narrative means.
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Narrative (architectural) motifs

The last occasion on which Briony encounters the
Marshalls at the end of the book takes place outside the
Imperial War Museum which echoes the other two
buildings in being based on Greek temple design and
featuring columns and a portico. Behind the neo-classical
facades that come to represent the ‘mausoleum of their
marriage’ (325) lurk respectively ruin, a joint lie, and the
destructive memories of a war from which Marshall made
his fortune. [cf: Blake’s ‘marriage hearse’]
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Narrative (architectural) motifs –
the Tallis family estate’s island temple
Stourhead estate, Wiltshire
Chiswick House and Gardens

McEwan uses very particular references to architectural and
landscape design in his characterisation of the Tallis family estate
as a setting for the novel (p.19 & pp. 72-3).

Architectural writer Elizabeth Hornbeck comments in her blog,
Stationary Nomad: Journeys in Visual Culture, that Ian McEwan’s
elaborate description of the island temple advances his work by:
1. managing in passing to associate the temple, which becomes
the scene where the novel’s central crime will take place on the
night the twins run away, with delinquent behavior;
Narrative (architectural) motifs –
the Tallis family estate’s island temple
Stourhead estate, Wiltshire
Chiswick House and Gardens
2. using architectural history to position the Tallis family within the
landed aristocracy, the 18th century patrons for such Adam style
houses (though only one half of the family is aristocratic; the
other belongs to the nouveau riche, descended from a
grandfather “who made the family fortune with a series of
patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps” – a subtle
gesture towards Briony’s fallible desire for secrets and
obsessive tidiness);
Stationary Nomad: Journeys in Visual Culture, Elizabeth Hornbeck (2002)
http://itinerantprofessor.blogspot.com/2008/03/atonement.html
Narrative (architectural) motifs –
the Tallis family estate’s island temple
Stourhead estate, Wiltshire
Chiswick House and Gardens
3. creating a metaphor for the Tallis family’s descent, being a time-
honored theme in British literature: the degeneracy of Britain’s
aristocracy (also providing an ironic counterpoint to Mr. Tallis’
efforts raising the prospects of working class Robbie Turner);
4. alluding to the situation of the children in the novel, who suffer
because of the adults’ neglect, much like this temple has been
abandoned by its parent, the vanished Adam house.
Stationary Nomad: Journeys in Visual Culture, Elizabeth Hornbeck (2002)
http://itinerantprofessor.blogspot.com/2008/03/atonement.html