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Atonement Atonement as a Masterpiece of Narrative Illusion by Kiro Jordanov

A careless and unfocused reader of Atonement may be caught into a web of McEwans play with the narrative of the book and may be lost in the alteration of narrators. The novel demands a close reading. Atonement brings a new approach to literature, not that the techniques that McEwan uses are new but that he has managed to incorporate them and combine them into one whole in such a crafty manner that it represents a narrative masterpiece. McEwan uses narrative voice, narrative order, narrative mood, narrative frequency and their combination to create narrative illusion and mislead the reader throughout the novel until the very end where, when all the pieces are brought into one whole a totally different light is cast on them. Not only that this narrative is used to create an illusion in the readers mind but it can be as well noticed that if it wasnt for the narrative McEwan used, the plot as it is wouldnt be possible. So the narration and the combination of narrative techniques actually drive and lead the plot at the same time. My goal in this essay will be to reveal the illusions made by the author. The novel is made of four parts in which Briony Tallis is actually the main narrator, but this will be revealed at the end of the novel. She is also the writer of the first three parts of the novel. The last section, which may be said to serve as an epilogue as it reveals the narrator, gives us a day in the life of Briony Tallis. All of this in essence deconstructs Briony as a singular individual and offers numerous options of looking at the text, its reality and the fabricated events and the constantly elusive Briony. The novel is written in third person singular, there is an implicit author in the text, but the epilogue is written in the first person singular. McEwan makes use of narrative devices to alert his reader to the status of his text as a literary artifact. For instance, there is a change of prose styles. In the long first part, McEwan writes in a slightly mannered prose, slightly held in, a tiny bit archaic. In part two, he chose to write a choppier prose with shorter, simpler sentences, in the final, fourth part, he employs a contemporary voice, one that is actually self-conscious and aware of its own act of narration. For

instance: Ive always liked to make a tidy finish,1 says the elderly Briony, simultaneously referring to her life and her lifes work. Although there is only one narrative voice, which turns out to be that of Briony, the aging novelist, McEwan employs what Grard Genette calls variable internal focalization in the first part, that is, narrative where the focal character changes (whereas the narrative voice doesnt change in Atonement). In the case of Atonement, the focal character is first Briony, then Cecilia, than Robbie, and so on. McEwan employs this particular modal determination2 partly to distinguish his narrative from the classical realistic novels association with omniscient narrator (Brionys lie came from positioning herself as such in her fictionalized scenario of events), and partly to demonstrate the adult Brinoys attempt to project herself into the thoughts and feelings of her characters, an act that is crucial to her search for forgiveness. A structural analysis of the narration in the novel shows that the book appears to start with a steady and reliable narration. The life of the main characters is presented and we feel comfortable with the narration of the story. The focalization is seemingly variable; the author has given the view of the characters involved in the given story. The scene by the fountain is actually the one which is the turning point of the novel. This scene is given from the point of view of more characters, which Genette calls a multiple focalization, First the author presents the scene from the point of view of Cecilia who according to Genette is a focal character. She is portrayed as an intradiegenetic naratee or as Gerard Genette also calls it the testimonial. He says: As for the function I called testimonial, for obvious reasons it has hardly any place except in homeodiegetic narrating of which the variant called I witness is, as its name indicates, nothing but one vast attestation: I was there, that is how it all happened.3 She appears to be the eye witness and also a part of the scene, where there is a dispute, after the quarrel and the breaking of the priceless family vase, she takes off her robe and jumps into the fountain. She comes out of the fountain in her underware. This is the scene which is wrongly perceived by Briony. In this part Briony, who is the focal character, sees the scene in completely different light. She misinterprets the scene. The bare skin of her sister and the quarrel between her and Robbie makes her think that her sister has been
Atonement p. 356 Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse an Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1980 3 Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1988
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assaulted, which is far from the truth. But that is the way she interprets it or as she wants to interpret it. Or as Brian Finney would say in his essay Brionys Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwans Atonement
Narration is an act of interpretation. Interpretation opens the possibility of misinterpretation, of what Jacques Lacan terms mconnaissance or mis recognition on the part of the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself.4

Briony at thirteen suffers from illusion, a certainty in her own judgment that brings tragedy to some of those closest to her. As a novice writer, she might even be thought of as belonging to Lacans imaginary order. Her misinterpretation of the adult symbolic world is the product of her childhood reading habits in which she read herself as Her Majesty the Ego, to misquote Freud.5 Her first crucial misreading is of the scene between Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain. When she first observes them, she decides from their formal posture that Robbie must be proposing marriage to her sister. Briony reflects: She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her6. But when Cecilia jumps into the fountain, Briony is perplexed at this disordered narrative sequence: the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal7. When she returns to the window after the two figures have left the scene, she feels liberated from the impenetrable facts: The truth had become as ghostly as invention8. She is free to interpret the scene as she pleases.9 The second scene is where Ian McEwan uses multiple focalization to provide a total misleading of the reader and once more a misinterpretation by Briony. This leads later to a fatal outcome for her close relatives and friends. The pure act of lovemaking is interpreted as an act of brutality and crime. The writer has again portrayed the scene from two different points of view. The act of lovemaking is seen as such from the point of view of Cecilia, and at the same time is misinterpreted by Briony in her childish mind. Once Briony opens Robbies explicit note to Cecilia, which she is too young to understand, she is forced to reconsider her interpretation of the whole scene. With the letter,
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Lacan, Jacques. crits: A selection trans. Alan Sheridan (Norton, 1977), p.6. Freud, Sigmund. Creative Writers and Daydreaming. p. 143. London Hogarth Press, 1935. 6 Atonement p. 36. 7 Atonement pp. 36-7. 8 Atonement p. 39. 9 Finney, Brian. Briony s StandAgainst Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan s Atonement. Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004), pp. 68 82. Indiana University Press, 2004.

she reflects, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness10. This letter that Briony has purloined acts as the signifier that determines her subjectivity. She convinces herself that Robbie is what Lola calls a maniac11 and what she calls the incarnation of evil 12, and that her sister is threatened and is in need of her help, a scenario which places her ego at the center of the story. So when she convinces herself that Robbie is the figure glimpsed running away from Lola in the dark, it is her novelists need for order that clinches it: The truth was in the symmetry . . . The truth instructed her eyes13. Fiction determines fact for her. But she is far from alone misinterpreting human behavior. Cecilia misinterprets Robbies removing his shoes and socks as an attempt to distance her14, just as Robbie misinterprets Cecilias undressing at the fountain, taking it to be a deliberate effort to humiliate him15. Both misinterpretations are caused by the class system.16 These are perfect examples to show McEwans writing of subjective narrative, as subjective view actually leads to misinterpretations just as it makes the reader subject of illusion and at the same time misguides him or her. Or as Benveniste has called the subjectivity of language:where the linguistics has taken its time in addressing the task of accounting to the passing from analysis of statements to analysis of relations between these statements and their generating instance what we also call their enunciating.17 As it is mentioned before, the first part of the novel has a seemingly steady narration but there is actually a frequent use of temporal prolepsis in the form of narrative anticipation. Genette writes that the Western narrative tradition tends to use this device carefully because the concern with narrative suspense that is characteristic of the classical conception of the novel does not easily come to terms with such a practice. Positioning his novel as well as him as a writer to be partly opposed to the Western narrative tradition, Ian McEwan in his novel makes a frequent use of anticipation in the first part. For instance, section thirteen opens like this: Within the half
Atonement pp. 106 - 07. Atonement p. 112. 12 Atonement p. 108. 13 Atonement p. 159. 14 Atonement pp. 26, 79. 15 Atonement p. 75. 16 Finney, Brian. Briony s StandAgainst Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan s Atonement. Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004), pp. 68 82. Indiana University Press, 2004. 17 Benveniste, Subjectivity in Language , Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 223-230. Florida, University of Miami, 1971.
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hour Briony would commit her crime18. The narrative in this instance is as much concerned with the business of narrating these events satisfactorily as it is with unfolding them. If the attention is turned back to the thirteen-year old Brionys immediate reaction to witnessing the scene by the fountain and the narrators use of temporal prolepsis it is made obvious that Briony is going to spend almost all her adult life working at the description of this scene before she can achieve the final multiple focalization of it from three characters perspectives. These are the points where the author breaches the conventionality of steady-going storytelling by using the narrative technique of temporal prolepses by giving an anticipation of the activities. The second and the third part happen almost simultaneously. There is a leap of five years in time, the narration is now set in the second World War. The third part also deals with the period of the Dunkirk battle and immediately after it. The interesting thing is the perspective of the characters rendered through the focal characters. The second part is rendered through the eyes of Robbie who is suffering the consequences of the lie that Briony has told. Instead of being imprisoned he is sent on the battle field in Dunkirk, and at that point he is waiting for the retreat of the army. The interesting thing here is the use of the focal character, who in this part is Robbie. He appears to be narrating about his experience at Dunkirk, which is his punishment for the alleged crime as well as about the prospects of meeting Cecilia. The question is: Do they really meet? The third part is narrated by Briony, who is now a nurse or a medical trainee. In this part the focal character is again Briony. She is now aware of the consequences of her lie. Now she knows what she has done. But how can she repent? How can she make things right? In the end there is a happy ending. At the end Robbie is again reunited with Cecilia, after the retreat. The story in the third part ends with this, the narrator has done her job, the atonement for the crime is achieved, the childish play has been repented, Briony has met her sister and Robbie, she has apologized and promised that she will tell the truth about the rape in the field. That is how the atonement would be reached, how the things would be made right. And Cecilia and Robbie would live happily ever after. There follows a surprise. The narration in the fourth part is now not the narration that was used throughout the whole novel. Now the story shifts back to the Talliss house. It is set in
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Atonement p. 146.

London in 1999, which is another leap in time. Now the narrator is again Briony, there is zero focalization in the fourth part. She is 77, a famous writer who is about to die. She is narrating her story about her mistake in the part and her desperate attempt to be atoned for it. The narration is now in the first person singular, or as Grard Genette would write in his Narrative Discourse the reliable narration is changed with the unreliable narration.19 It turns out that throughout the entire novel it was Brionys point of view. Things seem to be clarified. The illusion is shattered in the last part. The novel Atonement turns out to be a postmodern masterpiece. This is clear at the end of the book or more precisely in the fourth part. Atonement turns out to be a novel about imagination: reading about things you think you understand, but you dont understand. Throughout the novel we read the same scenes seen from different points of view, or different focal characters. Until the last part of the novel it is unclear whether what we read is reality, one persons interpretation of reality, a dream sequence, or fiction. McEwan uses many Brionys to successfully create the illusion. McEwan who is the author of the novel wants to pull back the curtain that makes Brionys illusion possible. At the end of the narrative, the story moves forward in time in 1999 and back to the hour where the performance is about to be played after Brionys story is already clear. The implication is that Robbie died on the last day of the evacuation in Dunkirk, and that Cecilia died a couple of months later in bombing and so on. By creating the story as it is Briony is trying to give everybody a second chance and at the same time she is trying to receive her atonement. Once the illusion has been shattered, the question of the focal characters and focalization is back in the focus. The narration in the first three parts is in the third person singular but at the end it is revealed that Briony is actually the narrator all the while. Another Bryony is revealed, Bryony the narrator or even better Bryony the writer, so one can go further by deconstructing Briony into three other characters: the child Briony, the nurse Briony and the writer Briony, the one that appears in the final part where the whole illusion is revealed and which is a kind of epilogue or conclusion of the three parts. This usage of the polylogue that is presented by Kristeva appears to contribute a lot to the illusion that the writer has presented: Kristeva sees semiotic operations that she identifies with what she calls the polylogical subject. The polylogue
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Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse an Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1980

is the rhythm of the unconscious before it is repressed and dematerialized in a signifying system. The polylogue forces language out of the transcendental position by means of multiplication and breaks through the boundaries of the symbolic by means of what Kristeva calls the transfinite element of language, which goes beyond the sentence and naming . . .20 Needless to say that the illusion is made around the focal characters of Cecilia and Robbie who are actually speaking trough the mouth of Briony the writer. McEwan uses special narrative techniques to construct the narrative illusion. It is noticeable that the narration in the last part of the novel goes from reliable to unreliable narration. The reader is perfectly comfortable in the first three parts of the book where it seems that there are reliable narrators who are very close to the implied author.21 The fictional truth of the narrative is relayed to the reader via the seemingly narrators Cecilia, Robbie, and Briony, who demonstrate a breath of knowledge of the situations. The personal involvement of these narrators does not, in this case, impede a truthful account of the story and thus the so called reliability of the narration is based on the narrators ability or rather inability to distance themselves from the personal relations with the other characters in the novel.22 Then suddenly in the fourth part, by the introduction of the narrator of the whole story, in case of Part Two it turns out that the whole three parts were actually a novel into a novel. The reliable narrator turns out to be unreliable; we see that Briony has a lack of credibility and knowledge of the story as well as personal involvement in the story. Therefore the unreliable narration provides the reader with incomplete and inaccurate information as a result of the incomplete knowledge of Briony since she hasnt witnessed the events in part two, whereas in the first part the main narrator is a child with an undeveloped perspective of the adult world, and thus she changes the real facts. All these narrative techniques that are shown above are crucial for the illusion McEwan has created in Atonement, but the final question that arises is why Briony has changed the story and the outcome after the third part. Brionys need for atonement is the incentive that makes the illusion upon the reader misleading him/her to see the story in the wrong way and then disillusioning him. Imagining

http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/2163/semiotic-symbolic.html Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1988 22 Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd Ed. New York: Penguin Books USA. 1991.
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what is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of humanity, but the young Brionys mind is still not developed enough to think on that level, still, this belief lies at the core of McEwans fiction and explains its moral stance, a stance that the mature writer, Briony comes to share once she has learned the need to respect the autonomy of others in her work). He has said that for him novels are not about teaching people how to live but about showing the possibility of what is like to be someone else, cruelty is a failure of imagination23. It is this kind of imagination that Briony, spending the rest of her professional life, seeks to acquire. The novel that we read and that took her adult lifetime to write is her attempt to project herself onto the feelings of the two characters whose lives were destroyed by her failure of imagination. Having mistakenly cast them in a story that totally misinterpreted them, Briony seeks to retell her story with the compassion and understanding that she lacked as a thirteen-year old girl. In turning Two Figures by a Fountain into Atonement, in exchanging the primacy of the authorial ego for an emphatic projection onto the feelings of others, Briony abandons the imaginary and enters the symbolic order. The narrative is driven by her unconscious desire to win back the love of her sister who probably died in 1940. All she can do after the implied Robbies and Cecilias death is to pursue that desire along her narrative. The writing of Atonement, which vividly imagines a reunion of Cecilia and Robbie after the retreat from Dunkirk (where he probably died), is the fictional and imaginative attempt to do what she failed to do at the time project herself onto the feelings and thoughts of the others, to grant them an authentic existence outside her own lifes experiences, to conjure up what it must have felt like for the wounded Robbie to participate in the retreat to Dunkirk, and for Cecilia to be forcibly separated from him and estranged from her family. She recognizes that such an act of atonement was always an impossible task, that the attempt was all. Brionys novel is her literary attempt at reparation for the damage she inflicted on the others as a child. The only way she can bring Robbie and Cecilia back together is by using her imagination to give them fictional life that allows her readers to experience their initial hope and subsequent despair which Brionys earlier ill-imagined fiction has caused.24

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Kate Kellaway, Review: Interview: At Home with his Worries, review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan (and interview with him), Observer, 16 September 2001, Review, p. 3. 24 Finney, Brian. Briony s StandAgainst Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan s Atonement. Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004), pp. 68 82. Indiana University Press, 2004

With the first three parts Briony puts the reader in her shoes, when she says: read what the consequences might be, Ive experienced it, and it didnt feel good, she is also saying: some things can be repaired only in your minds. To conclude, what is the purpose of the last part of the novel? The novel may as well have ended with the third part, nice rounded up ending. The epilogue can be taken as a diary confession or extraneous commentary on the novel proper. This concluding section is shattering the illusion of the previous three parts, opening the cards, raising the curtains off the stage and showing what life in reality is.

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Used materials: 1. Benveniste, Subjectivity in Language, Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 223230. Florida, University of Miami, 1971.Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and USA. 1991. 2. Finney, Brian. Brionys StandAgainst Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwans Atonement. Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004), pp. 68 82. Indiana University Press, 2004 3. Freud, Sigmund. Creative Writers and Daydreaming. P. 143. London Hogarth Press, 1935 4. Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse an Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1980 5. Genette, Grard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press Ithaca, New York, 1988 6. Kate Kellaway, Review: Interview: At Home with his Worries, review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan (and interview with him), Observer, 16 September 2001, Review 7. Lacan, Jacques. crits: A selection trans. Alan Sheridan (Norton, 1977), p.6. 8. McEwan, Ian. Atonement, London: Vintage Books, 2007 9. http://www/public-republic. net/-atonement-part-1.php 10. http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/2163/semiotic-symbolic.html 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonement_(novel) Literary Theory. 3rd Ed. New York: Penguin Books