Atonement And Writing In Ian Mcewan Novel

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ATONEMENT AND WRITING IN IAN MCEWAN NOVEL

Motto: “When you do not find peace within yourself, searching elsewhere is in vain”

Francois de la Rochefoucauld

ABSTRACT

Atonement is like a symphony played by a great orchestra whose conductor changes the music sheet during the performance. The prelude and the acts remain the same from representation to representation. We refer to the nude facts. But the tableaux are changing according to the conductor will and power. The writer, Briony is a demiurge in her writings. But what about real life? What about guilt, pain, forgiveness? Running from guilt, as the opera tableaux are changing, writing and rewriting the same facts from different prospective, escaping the reality through art might be a way of atonement. Writing is not some sort of punishment, any way not for the demiurge of writing. Consequently, the end of a novel offers no absolution, no reconciliation, does not restore harmony, and is no atonement. The simple existence of the guilt itself in someone memories does not lead necessarily to atonement. As for the assumed guilt, well, this is for another demiurge…

The research questions

The existence of guilt is it enough for attempting the reach of atonement? Can atonement to be reached through literary writing that changes realities and prospective?

The research method

In this study I used qualitative research involving the understanding of an event, to point out the particular characteristics or behaviors, from the perspective of the actor involved. In our case: Lola is raped and Briony falsely accuses Robbie for being the rapist, while both Lola and Paul Marshall know to the truth, but remain silent. Thematic analysis: I have established a theme that I consider important: assuming guilt as a condition for a possible atonement, even through writing.
Qualitative data collected refers to the motivations, aspirations, attitudes and behavior of the characters analyzed. I collected data by reading various articles published on the Internet (critical reviews, interviews with the author), books downloaded from the internet, and reading some books or chapter from them in the library. The main source is obviously the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan, the English version, an imprint of Doubleday division of Random House, New York, 2001. Data are presented as quotations from the novel or other books I used. Data synthesis in qualitative research is usually narrative and my essay no exception in this regard.

Introduction

“If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is that he took only inner realities as realities, as «truths» — that he understood the rest, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical only as signs, as opportunities for analogy”.

No, the quote above does not belong to any literary critic and does not refer to Briony, the heroine of the novel Atonement. Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Christ himself.
And yet, also the young Briony took her inner realities as truths, trying to shape the objective reality according to their own vision of how life should look like, a vision dominated by order (her great obsession) and even social conformism.

Of course, Ian McEwan does not grant shadowy depth to concept of guilt that is given by Dostoevsky, nor Briony Tilles is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. However, like Dostoevsky, Ian McEwan determines his heroine to seek atonement her entire life. Briony Tilles also carries a tragic guilt, her teenage mistake resulting in the drama and even in the death of her sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s lover, Robbie.

"Tragic is not an aesthetic category, but a larger category of spirit, its area of manifestation comprising real life, and knowledge, and tragic art." It is exactly what Briony is incapable to understand and, in my opinion, she will not understand until the end. Of her own life and of the novel.

Because Briony Tallis cannot and does not accept and acknowledge firmly her own guilt, she does not seek forgiveness, but atonement. Being a writer, Briony (Ian McEwan) sees herself a God who can do and undo lives and destinies, according to her own vision, and that is way we do not encounter even a phrase which could lead us to the conclusion that the heroine sincerely and completely takes upon her the guilt of destroying destinies. “… to take upon himself not the punishment but the guilt, that alone would be divine.”

According to Oxford English Dictionary Atonement meaning and etymology is “… Cf. the following: 1533 Q. Cath. Parr Erasm. Comm. Crede 162 To reconcile himself and make an onement with god.1599 Bp. Hall Sat. iii. vii. 69 Which never can be set at onement more.1555 Fardle Facions ii. xii. 298 The redemption, reconciliation, and at onement of mankind with God the father.”

Contemporary definitions include the one which is not related to religion: a state of togetherness between two people. Atonement presupposes two parties that are estranged, with the act of atonement being reconciliation of them into a state of harmony.

To which definition gives preference Ian McEwan? In my opinion, it does not matter if the prevailing definition is: To reconcile himself and make an onement with god (God = the creator, the writer) or two parties that are estranged, with the act of atonement being reconciliation of them into a state of harmony (Briony tries to contact his sister Cecilia, to restore harmony and the initial order). There is no forgiveness without guilt and forgiveness Briony does seek, neither from herself nor from her "victims". As long as the guilt is not clearly assumed, reconciliation cannot be, and the end of the novel reveals us that it does not occur. It remains a potentiality.

With Atonement, (2001), Ian McEwan asks about the power of manipulation of writers: a novelist writes that as a child she accused her sister's lover of rape. Its history mixes two tragic stories: that of a broken happiness and that of a lost innocence. Atonement was published in Romanian under the title Ispășirea, POLIROM Publishing House, Bucharest, 2014. Personally I do not believe that “ispașirea” represent a complete and fully covering translation for “atonement”, but as the English term is still under discussion and disputed, it is difficult to suggest a better translation.

Analyze

The assumed guilt

Briony Tilles is not the only "guilty" character. Of course, we can refer as well to Robbie and to the couple Lola and Paul Marshall. But the fault the stitched stories of the novel revolve around is that of Briony. Why? Because she is looking for atonement, as it “ presupposes two parties that are estranged, with the act of atonement being reconciliation of them into a state of harmony.” She does not look for forgiveness, although over the years, in a London threatened by clouds of war floating over it, Briony is trying to contact his sister, Cecilia. Indeed, in her novel, writes the scene where Briony meets Cecilia and Robbie (together for a brief moment) and they refuse to forgive her. Like she projects her guilt on them by extension. Refusing to forgive is also a sin, is not it? And here we are: the purest and brightest characters have their guilt. Although she never explicitly asks for their forgiveness. She renounces to go to college and became nurse during the war, as a sort of penance; at least this is what Cecilia reckons from the letter she received from Briony. “… she’s saying that she wants to be useful in a practical way. But I get the impression she’s taken on nursing as a sort penance.”

As famous psychologists say ‘‘guilt is backward-looking in many cases because it focuses on what one has done wrong in the past, but guilt also has a strong anticipatory element’’.

Is forgiveness an anticipation for Briony? The kind of forgiveness which is not an empty forgiveness, easily overlooked, disregarding her guilt, but always a creative forgiveness, meaning the forgiveness that abolishes the conscious negation of fundamental values of ethics and morals, the apostate worship of her literary creation. It could be that way, only if she assumes the guilt. I my opinion she did not, as I will argue further.

Besides caring for wounded soldiers on the frontline, in bombed London, Briony continues to write and even tried to publish. Of course novella sent for publication (Two Figures by the Fountain) refers to the scene near the fountain, which has been seen by the young Briony from distance years ago, and which has Cecilia and Robbie as protagonists. It is this scene, misinterpreted, that that will guide the young Briony to suspect that Robbie is a detestable character and cannot be trusted. This scene is the trigger of her inner mechanism which will determine Briony to accuse Robbie for raping Lola. As evident from the letter of refusal that Briony receives from the publisher, at the time of writing this novella she has not yet the power to assume even the misjudgment that led to Robbie’s incarceration. She simply describes the movements of some “living statues” in and near a fountain.

“… For all the fine rhythms and nice observations, nothing much happens after a beginning that has such promise. … Just more about the look and feel of things, and some irrelevant memories. …. This static quality does not serve your evident talent well.” [Atonement: 182]

In her desire to publish, to become a well known writer, even by exposing drama of Cecilia and Robbie, is a trace of selfishness and not a penance in search of atonement. Her obsessive desire to write transcends the horrors of war or dramas of the loved ones. But that, for an artist it could be understood. “Warfare, as we remarked, is the enemy of creative activity” [Atonement: 182] writes in his letter the editor. Which Briony is the true one? The one involved in the war effort, even if not out of conviction but as a form of penance or the artist obsessed with writing and eager for recognition? At the time of writing the novella, Briony has not assumed the guilt. It was a mistake, yes. With absolutely dramatic consequences, that she is trying to fix. But guiltiness means much more than the appropriation of mistakes and their result. “Individuals claim to be unintentional […], deny and diffuse responsibility, disregard the harm […], and make external attributions […] in order to suppress or minimize guilt. Reframing the incident seems to have an effect on both the valence (i.e., from guilt to guiltlessness) and the intensity of guilt.” Briony just reframed the incident in her novella.

“For me, she made a mistake, allowing her imagination to distort her judgment” says Ian McEwan in an interview given to the magazine L’Express on January 20, 2014.

I would like to take a quick look on the notion of “mistake” attributed to Briony's action, as the word "mistake", appears with recurrence throughout the novel. The author, naturally, defends his heroine. I suspect that the adult Briony also looks at the act of accusing an innocent man without having the slightest evidence, like a mistake of judgment based on her vivant imagination and her obsession to fiction writing. If the compulsive idea of order accompanied by the one of justice (in the romantic perception of a girl of 13-years-old) dictated the action, it seems that the idea of through was not familiar to her. It is understandable that the young Briony in her puberty years, cannot distinguish between the two, but it is expected that, with the passing years, her intelligence and readings have clearly outlined the two notions. Equally, is expected that 18- years-old Briony has made the difference between a mistake and a deeply reprehensible act, with dramatic consequences in the lives of others. Her attempt to "fix" refers to a mistake; she cannot say that she will fix the broken destiny of the people hurt by her act. Simple statement meant to absolve Robbie for the accusation cannot bring his life or Cecilia's back on a promising track which seemed to be possible few years ago.

Briony's purpose, in the first pages of Atonement, to take advantage of The Trials of Arabella to attract however much consideration regarding herself as could reasonably be expected will be reflected afterward in her “expiation novel”, a story in which she plays a mixture of roles.

As Briony’s is the author of the “expiation novel”, despite the fact that the rest of characters in the work are concurred a specific measure of self-rule (a self-rule, however, that not every character is granted with, noticeably Lola), in the end it is Briony herself who decides the way in which her characters and their stories unfold in the content. As Briony, at the age of 77, acknowledges in the last part of the novel (I see it like a postscript), which is written in the first person, she has willingly volunteered to take on her account the problematic truths and painful actions of her story – she abstains from informing her readers about the lovers’ passing away, for instance, accepting that her public will not have any desire to cope with such drama – “Who would want to believe that?”, “except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (Atonement: 371). At this point, Briony goes back to the role of “creator of intrigue”, a role she manifested so well, too well, in the first part of the novel.

Briony’s response to her sister’s distress on watching Robbie accused of rape and arrested is pitiable because it shows two things: first, that Briony did not understand anything about the relationship between Cecilia and Robbie and second, she hasn’t the capacity of understanding that the her relationship with Cecilia will never be the same because of her actions of the terrible night. Briony’s response to her sister’s conduct on that crucial night is a top example that she has no compassion and understanding for others’ feelings.

Briony’s eagerness to portray the twins’ bodies floating on the water, the indifference with which she observe Lola’s grief and her manner to respond to Cecilia’s distress is the expression “avant la lettre” of the “amorality” which her future writings will be “known for” (Atonement: 41).

Even if she is disposed to judge other people and to criticize sinners, Briony is not equally enthusiastic in evaluate her own deeds. In her childishness she considers that her own acts and reasons must be spotless, consequently she makes no attempt to calculate their finality and costs. The author tells us that she looks at herself as being “guiltless”, and her part in identifying the attacker is “vital”.(Atonement: 174)

Briony has no reserve in desecrating the lives of Cecilia and Robbie and using them as fabric for her fiction writing. The old Briony we meet in the last part of the novel obviously considers that her position to Cecilia and Robbie has changed fundamentally from the one she had on the crucial night when she identified Robbie as being the rapist. But is clearly an appearance. This Briony in the crepuscule of her life sees no harm in donating to the War Museum the letters that Cecilia and Robbie wrote to each other, transmitted to her by Nettle – one of Robbie’s comrades in arms. Although this deed is shown as having as cause the kind purpose of preserving the love between Cecilia and Robbie through these letters, it never occurs to Briony that Robbie and Cecilia might wanted to keep the privacy of their correspondence and not to expose it to visitors to some museum in London. In the last part of the novel, a postscript I name it, the word laid down on paper is an object of ardent explorations and an arena of powerful conflicts just like in the narrative of Briony’s expiation novel. In her world the printed word overcomes the lives of real people. In her view, whoever triumphs over it, acquires the absolute power.

The way I see her guilt is multiple, is not reduced to the only act of accusing Robbie. She is accountable for other wrongdoings carried out against her victims. When Briony distantly observes the scene near the fountain, she quickly comes to the conclusion that Robbie is a threatening person. This leads her to open Robbie’s letter to Cecilia and to read it. Not only that she violates the private correspondence between the two, which is an outrageous action itself, but she goes further and presents the letter to her cousin Lola and tells her what she thinks about Robbie. As she tries to save Cecilia from Robbie – the “sex-maniac”, she rudely enters in the library, where the two have a private conversation. After pointing out to Robbie as being the rapist of Lola, in her determined effort to get recognition, Briony takes the letter and gives it to her mother as well as to the police, as evidence for Robbie’s bad temper.

The persistent social class difference, under the influence of social prejudice, makes it easy for Briony to accuse Robbie, the son of their housekeeper. I doubt Briony would leveled against Paul Marshall if she knew the truth. Briony had the nerve to accuse Robbie of such a dreadful deed because, even still a child, she sensed Robbie’s inferior social status. She was already impregnate with the snobbery of her social class. Cecilia goes to London and interrupts all contact with the Tallis as she sees “the snobbery that lay behind their stupidity” (Atonement: 209) when they believed the accusation made by Briony.

Briony probably has a hidden feeling of resentment against Robbie, which could have influenced her deeds. When Briony was ten years old she plunged into the pool in order to be saved by Robbie and afterwards she told Robbie that she is in love with him. Remembering that scene Robbie thinks that it could be the motivation for her behavior three years later. She might have been jealous without even know it. Years later, Briony recalls the same scene in her own perspective and affirms that she dismissed her childish love from her mind three days after confessing it to Robbie. Nevertheless, Briony’s vision on the matter cannot be trusted considering her vivid imagination, her love for fiction and the numerous versions she wrote before achieving the final version of the novel.

In the fourth part of the novel, Briony refers to Cecilia and Robbie as being “the lovers”. By doing so, Briony continues to see them through the same romantic lens, despite the years gone by, instead of looking them as real people.

Atonement’s final shows a Briony still occupied with the assignment to compose the “unruly world” of others “just so” (Atonement: 7). In the end she cannot perceive Robbie and Cecilia the way they really were but as main characters in the fiction written not for them but for herself.

The writing

Briony is a enthusiastic reader; in her life the imagination has an significant role. As we find out from the novel, she not only devours the fiction she reads but also aims to replicate the literary styles of the read works. The reader finds out that, until she appropriates the “informal psychological realism” which defines the her style of writing in the latest version of Atonement, she had “written her way through the whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent”. (Atonement: 41). The style used in the last version of Briony’s expiation novel is a mix of classic realism that characterized the novel of the 19th century and the psychological profundity of the prose of 20th century.

This informal psychological realism style is meant to diminish her remorse for causing Robbie’s arrest: “Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream – three streams! – of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life” (Atonement: 320). It took almost sixty years and the disposal of previous versions of her expiation novel, for Briony to earn enough empathy for Robbie and Cecilia, so she can write a really perceptive story about them, a story which focuses on their love and Briony’s immoral interfering. The everlasting struggle between Briony’s obsession for order and her vivid imagination is the main spring that generates the meanders of her character. Briony’s imagination animates and nourishes her creativity, while her obsession for order guides her (mostly in the first parts of Atonement) to attempt and impress representative models on her narratives, to drive herself and her characters into the parts she has met in her readings or to copy the styles that have had an impact on her. One motif of the Briony’ actions and wrong judgments that led to the drama narrated in Atonement could be the subjection of reality to fiction on the critical night of Lola’s rape. Briony perceives world around her in consonance with her readings.

The critic and novelist Anita Brookner in the review of Atonement explores Briony’s choice to use fiction so as to wash herself of her misdeed and guilt. Briony’s expiation novel, as A. Brookner discloses, is the narration of an offense she carries out at the age of thirteen, an error which sentence Cecilia and Robbie to terrible unhappiness and accelerates their deaths. This narrative, nevertheless, is planned to be published and read by Briony’s public as fiction; is not Briony’s intention to write an autobiography. In the review it is stated that it is outrageous that, of all the choices Briony had, she selected this way to compromise with her misdeed. Even if it is frequently understood that literary fiction is rooted on real facts, argues Brookner, the readers do not access fiction in the same manner they would read a news in their favorite magazine or an autobiography.

Supporting my line of thinking, Brookner states that by choosing to narrate all the events happened before and after the dreadful night in the form of fiction, Briony does not assume the guilt. Briony’s expiation novel is at the most a type of compensation not an intended and assumed mean of atonement. The moral analysis made by Brookner on Briony Tallis based on last part of the novel has a bitter conclusion: “Elderly and celebrated, Briony expunges the guilt from which she has always suffered, whereas she might have fared better to have told the truth in the first instance.”

While doing the research for this essay I found out that in Christian Science Monitor, Ron Charles published a review of Atonement in which he reaches the same conclusion but with a Christian approach: “The role of author entices us with the chance for endless revision, but assuming that role precludes the possibility of atonement with an Author outside ourselves.”

If I am to analyze psychologically Briony’s act of accusation, I would say it was not just a mistake or an omission. Multiple causes are staying at its origin. It was her aspiration for a fiction narration, drama and conspiracy along with her misperceptions of the scenes she unintentionally witnessed which determined her to create the story of Robbie raping Lola and presented it the police. She was probably conscious that she was twisting the truth or that she wasn’t telling the entire truth.

She didn’t look for the truth or reality, not for a moment. She preferred the fantasies. The last phrase of the novel also demonstrates that the expiation novel will be to a certain extent about composing the truth than about exposing the nude truth. An alternate ending of the novel could have been a splendid happy ending. The lovers would be reunited; their days of misery would come to an end, and will live merrily ever after. But that would be quite a conservative ending of a conventional novel. With reference to the sad end of the novel, Briony asks herself: “but what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I'd like to think this isn't weakness or… evasion… but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness”. (Atonement: 351)

We can only speculate if it is about avoidance or not and if it is the last act of gentleness for the lovers or for her own scruples, but it is certain that Briony’s final of the novel was not instinctively written to satisfy her readers or to complete the her preference for romantic narratives. It is an obvious purpose to fulfill special mental and emotional wishes. As she refers to “weakness” and “evasion” she doesn’t attempt to escape the truth. The ambiguity of the phrase arises because she is equally referring to the weakness and elusion in her prior actions and conduct, to everything she should have done long time ago. Briony was willing to mirror her misconduct in a novel and she attempted to lay down this story in so many variants all her life but she could not reach the end and publish it. The call for meditation on the events happened more than sixty years ago lasted in her thoughts until her very last moment of life. I would say is a circle because the novel starts with the events happened in her childhood and finishes with the narration of those events, in a final variant, as she is dying. She could atone for her offence in so many ways but she chooses the one which she feels that is the reason of her existence: the writing. Even during the war, in all that madness, she writes. “And at that time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done” (Atonement: 280) The novel is an deliberate effort to find comfort, some sort of escape and finally to detach from the remorse she carried with her so many years. The concept of atonement has a fundamental role in the story and the novel itself represents a confession, chronicle and reparation.

Also, the novel represents more than Briony’s personal expiation; it reflects her psychological and artistic progress. It pictures her psychological need for writing down the events occurred in different stages of her life. At all times she practiced writing to generate and organize her world, but the fictions were dominating and disturbing life and reality. Through the end of her life she was capable to write the novel which is her confession and meditation on her own life. Over the years, her writing talent and judgment have evolved and as a result her understanding and discernment of reality have changed essentially. She becomes capable to reflect on her deeds, to recognize her errors of judgment and furthermore to understand what was really happed in the hot summer of 1935. In consequence she was able to writhe a psychologically sophisticated novel to satisfy, to some degree, her need for apologize and “reconciliation with herself”. From this point of view, Briony’s novel may “constitute some semblance of completion”, and for that reason it looks that Briony reached atonement in some extend and concluded her last mission of by writing the novel.

However, if we observe closely the moral side of the narration we understand that although writing a novel is an estimable act, Briony cannot cover her weakness and guilt with her confession and apology. It is evident that confession and excuses are now basically ineffective because the truth should have been told long time ago. Robbie died on the beach of Dunkirk, Cecilia died during the bombing of London. That time Briony was eighteen years old and in by the end of their lifetime she could do more for his exoneration and maybe she could save the lovers’ life. But she did not have the courage to make to step out from her fantasies and enter to the real live of Cecilia an Robbie: “What she needed, Briony told herself yet again, was backbone” (Atonement: 77). It was not about the spinal column of a story, as her publisher wrote her once; it was about her moral fiber. As Briony progresses as a writer, she comes to know the supremacy that words can have in literary fictions; the only thing is that literature might be also about real life, but is not real life. All her life, she searched for this power in her writing trying to transgress it in real life. As for the real life, she failed.

Briony would like to get comfort and relief for her misdeed, but she does not ask or look for forgiveness. Form Cecilia and Robbie, or even God, only if she would have been a believer. Briony refers to God just before the end of her life. Not from a religious perspective, but from the writer perspective. The most important struggle of her life is to find the final answer to the matter of reaching atonement through writing. Is the problem raised by the aestheticism in 18th and 19th century, which in England led by Oscar Wilde. Immanuel Kant has spoken about autonomy of art. Art must exist for itself, for the essence of its inner beauty. The artist should not be concerned with morality or utility not even with the pleasure that his art offers to the public. Well, although Briony seems to agree with this concept, the last part that involves the pleasure of the public is too important for her ego. Before she dies, looking back to her life and work Briony thinks:

“… how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? … There is nothing outside her. … No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.” (Atonement: 372)

Now Briony knows that there is no possible atonement for her as she believes that her creation through writing puts equivalence between her and God. A Demiurge does not atone. Never the less, she tried. As I can see, Briony did not write the novel to tell Cecilia’s and Robbie’s story, but her story. The lovers’ story would be just another melodrama. Her story is about “a young girl, a young and foolish girl, who sees something from her bedroom window which she does not understand, but she thinks she does” (Atonement:31). In a way she can attain atonement in one of its meaning. The complex term atonement encloses also the concept of remorse which is somewhat a reflexive state than a dynamic endeavor to repair the misdeeds and to diminish their consequences.

I think that to perceive the novel as a quest for others forgiveness it would be false. On one hand, Briony herself writes the novel we are reading, and by the time she finishes it her victims, Cecilia and Robbie, are not longer alive, as a result their forgiveness is not an issue any more. On the other hand, the postscript written in the first person emphasizes Briony’s project to redefine herself as she is fully conscientious of her misdeed. Briony as portrayed in the actual novel (first three parts) is enrolled in an action to reconcile with herself, as Briony shown up in the postscript as author considers that writing of the whole story is mean to acquire the same finality. The postscript revealed me the novel as a picture of Briony with some other personages in the background, made by Briony herself, a self-portray, which brings me back to her ego. By stating the above, I do not mean to affirm that forgiveness is not important question raised by the novel, I mean that for Briony – the writer, the problem is of secondary importance compared to the writing itself. The way the novel is built does not allow the reader to find out whether Cecilia and Robbie would have conferred Briony their forgiveness, but in the end, the novel written by Briony is not about them, it is all about her. For that reason I conclude that the main theme of Atonement is self-forgiveness. It is obvious if we look at the facts of Briony’s moral progress.

18-years-old Briony has understood how deeply she harmed Robbie and Cecilia. She experiences the profound pain of a shame which circles the adversity toward her; Briony sees herself as “weak, stupid, confused, cowardly, evasive.” She feels that she cannot rely on her moral attributes, and, in the beginning of her nursing period, it seems that she abandoned her dream to become a writer.

Until her age of seventy-seven, Briony rewrites the novel several times. In Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” we see the criminal Lady Macbeth washing her hands over and over in order remove the blood she thinks that exists physically on her hands. By writing the novel in different variants, changing the story “as God”, the truth is obviously altered. The reader is not granted with the entire truth about what really happened. Maybe she slips some truth in her stories, maybe she is not longer able to tell which is the truth, maybe, in the end of her life and with her mental illness, she doesn’t remember the truth. Her remorse is still there where it was in her youth. All her life she tried to wash out this sorrow, this remorse, without assuming the guilt. Rewriting the novel is her way to escape guilt; the final version of the novel was only “a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair” (Atonement: 372).

She was guilty for driving Cecilia and Robbie apart, for Robbie’s imprisonment, but when the war starts she understand that Robbie, unwillingly going to frontline, could be killed in the battle: “…but now she understood how the war might compound her crime”(Atonement: 288). It is war which killed Robbie and Cecilia, but her guilt is no less. As I stated before, her guilt is the result of many wrong actions that twisted the lives of Robbie and Cecilia, leading to the tragic end.

Atonement can be obtained under the condition of personal reformation and injured party’s forgiveness. In Atonement what we can see is an attempt to atone. The victims are no longer alive to give their forgiveness. Cecilia and Robbie died before Briony finds the courage to ask them forgiveness and by doing that to open the way for a real atonement. She is not directly responsible for their death, but morally she must take the blame. She cannot go back in time to that dramatic night of 1935 and correct things; all she does has as purpose to find some relief for her conscience and peace with herself. The term atonement has powerful spiritual implications; but Briony is not a believer. She cannot turn to God for forgiveness. As she says “is no one to turn to”. Religion is not an alternative for her, so she cannot be guided by this kind of faith.

She imposes herself a “penance” as Cecilia ironically calls it: to be a nurse and to take care of the wounded soldiers. A young woman of her social class who desperately seeks for admiration and recognition it was difficult to deal with the humble job to clean daily the bed pots and to be admonished by the chief nurse if she fails to do her duties correctly: “She was abandoning herself to a life of strictures, rules, obedience, housework and a constant fear of disapproval” (Atonement: 276). This comforts Briony for a while, the atrocities of war cover her self-pity. Her remorse was also a type of egotistic self-pity. Briony feeds this type of self-pity by rewriting the story; what she has done must not fade away because all substance and motivation would be lost.

In my opinion, the importance of the postscript consists in supporting our suspicions that Briony is an untrustworthy raconteur, as the old Briony reveals that the story she told in the first part of her novel is the last variant of several drafts which she has written previously. From her statement “… is only in this last version that lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement” (Atonement: 370) as she goes away, it is evident that she has built diverse finals to her versions. Furthermore, she says that her “fifty-nine-year assignment is over” (Atonement: 369), which indicates that this draft is her last one, and also the one which she has decided to publish, as she reveals that she has she will publish it until Paul and Lola Marshall are dead, in order to avoid potential legal procedures. This is not just the final variant of her novel, but also the single one having the postscript, might suggest that the ending to this draft is the truthful one. However, as Briony discloses the story’s real final. Briony’s only disclosure about the final to this last version of Atonement is that it is the unique version with a happy ending which raise the probability that this story is the real one, as it is possible to represent just another of her storylines. A possibly important information which I consider significant is Briony’s affirmation, in the postscript, that she is affected by vascular dementia, which is a type of Alzheimer, without the accesses of fury. Consequently, she will lose her memory, her capability to recognize people, places, things, mobility and become a being who just breathes. This is the reason for which she decides that this variant is the novel to be published. In addition, it is some ambiguity about her state of mind – if all faculties are intact, and her condition could cause us to believe that this story is to be distrust. If my hypothesis is correct, than the synchronism of these factors makes the happy-ending version her last version, which leaves it without any distinctive importance. Thus, the novel, McEwans’ novel, has an open ending which I find a matter-of-course, because the term atonement could be looked as open notion itself; a wrongdoing, a sin, cannot be annulated but only paid for, which means that atonement cannot be absolutely accomplished. Therefore, if we are to see atonement as an open ended notion, it appears reasonable to assume that the intention of the novel Atonement is to emphasize this conception and, as a result, the novel should have an open ending as well. As a consequence, instead of providing the reader a satisfactory and trustworthy ending, it seems that Briony’s accumulation of additional elements drives the attention to the extent of various paths she never considered to take. It appear to be an undeniable truth that Briony consumed most of her later life searching for relief, having a constant remorse and sorrow that she could not disburden. Though, I believe that Ian McEwan’s novel could have a moral finality if and only if Briony’s narration is considered to be the mirror of truth. Hence, the more untrustworthy she seems to be, a reduced amount of reliability and credit is given to her supposed aspiration and effort to atone. The postscript reveals that Briony’s narrative cannot be trusted and the reader inclines to wonder if and to what extent the material existing in first three parts is introduced by Briony to represent herself in a sympathetic way and, in so doing, deceives the reader. In the postscript, Briony suggests that Robbie died “of septicemia . . . on 1 June 1940” and Cecilia was “killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station” (Atonement: 370). If this is the truth, then Briony never visit Cecilia and Robert in their apartment in London, consequently she could not promise them to tell the truth to their parents and to change her declaration to the police in order to clear Robbie of the accusation. Eventually, this puts under the question the whole suggestion of Briony’s atonement and the significance related to it. Briony’s comment that “no one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel” (Atonement: 371), as her effort to convince herself and the readers, that her crime was less severe than she primarily represented it and, in addition, that her writing reduced its after-effects, induces the feeling that “she has found her atonement”.

Conclusions

I tried to approach the theme of this essay by answering the two question formulated in its opening. My conclusions related to the questions are as follows.

As for the question of guilt, it is obvious in my opinion that only an assumed guilt can open the path to atonement, although the atonement is improbable to by completely achieved.

The conscience of guilt, the intimate relationship between the people who deed a crime which inflicted deep injury in other lives is of the essence of true penance and atonement seeking.

It came to me as obvious that Briony does not have this kind of intimacy with her guilt. As she is narrator of the Cecilia and Robbie story, although the story comprises her and her crime, Briony remains somehow outside it. The impression is that she is still looking from the window all the drama. Briony has a measure of amorality that prevents her to appropriate her own guilt, to feel it as part of her. As a result of Briony’s incapacity to go deep into inner her, all she experiences is remorse, sadness and self-pity. She looks for forgiveness, but not from Cecilia and Robbie but from herself. And that she get, the way I interpreted the opening ending of Atonement. There is no confession of her crime ever, not to a living person. There is no other punishment except from the ones determined and imposed by herself. The nursing is just an episode of her 77 years-old life. During the war many women did the same thing not as penance but out of conviction. The writing is the reason for her existence, so it cannot represent a penance. Eventually, she becomes a well known writer, as she always dreamed.

Rewriting the story over and over again, each version from different prospective and with probable different ending led me to the conclusion that Briony did not see the “mistake” she made many years earlier as a crime. Not really. In fact she writes the novel, not to give immortality to Cecilia and Robbie as she stated, but to herself, as main heroine and author of such bestseller. She is not the prisoner of her guilt searching for liberation, but a troubled soul searching for self-forgiveness.

Is she remorseful? Yes! Does she experience the profound sense of guilt? No! Can she atone? Never!

As for the writing as a way to atonement, I think that is not possible either. Even the last version of the novel, the one which is going to be published, narrate the real story, by writing it she does not undo the harm she did to Robbie and Cecilia. She cannot “fix it” by writing. The lovers, as she calls them in the postscript are not longer alive to give her their forgiveness. And I very much doubt that their forgiveness would have been conditioned by or related to her writing.

Changing the story so many times, writing so many version does not make her a trustful person or writer. Her lack of courage in life manifests in her writing as she rewrites the narrative over and over. Even she thinks that a writer is a real God for the characters and stories he/she writes, Briony acts hesitantly in her writing by feeling the need to change the story. Her novel does not unfold the truth, but makes it uncertain. She does not seek atonement through writing; she wants to fulfill her need for writing and fiction. The act of creation is above the tragic lives of Cecilia and Robbie and, under this circumstance no atonement is possible.

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