“Atonement” by McEwan is an amazing in its sincerity chronicle of lost time, which is led by a teenage girl, in her bizarre and childishly cruel way, overestimating and rethinking the events of adult life. Having witnessed the rape, she interprets it in her own way – and sets in motion a chain of fatal events that will come back to haunt in the most unexpected way in many, many years. This work was written by one of the masters of British postmodernism, which could not but affect its external form.
“Atonement” definitely constitutes the author’s collection of best works. The principle of editing, polyphony, a combination of various narrative techniques, playing with artistic time – the author skillfully uses all the methods characteristic of this movement in the “Atonement.” Structurally, the novel falls into three parts, the last of which merges with the epilogue. Each piece differs from the others both in terms of style and through the use of different types of narration. This paper examines the narrative fragmentation technique applied in the second part of the book.
The reader will immediately notice that the story unfolds from several perspectives, thus revealing the experiences of two heroes at the same time. In the second part, through the eyes of Robbie, the reader learns the cruelty of war, the loyalty of love, and the pain of parting. Preferring the horrors of war to the maddening silence of a prison cell, the hero finds himself in the midst of the ultimate embodiment of chaos. Following his hero, the author impartially describes everything that happens around him, wondering how long a person can withstand and what he can get used to. Robbie himself has long come to terms with the madness reigning around, thinking only about one thing – he must endure and return to Cecilia. Only her voice, constantly ringing in his thoughts, keeps him from madness.
The horrors of war and the inglorious battle also seem to be presented by the hero in fragments. Robbie’s thoughts are carried away to reflections and memories whenever the situation heats up again, or the excitement and emotions are felt on the military front. His hand reaches out to his breast pocket to check whether the letter from his dear Cecilia is in place, after which the stream of past stories and experiences refers him to a meeting with a kopeck piece. In general, the fragmented narrative structure used in the second part allows the writer to transcend the boundaries of time and space and concentrate on a single moment through parallel and cross-cutting edits. The narrative almost leaps in time, thus, granting reader the opportunity to delve deeper into the described events, having seen them from Robbie’s side and observing how the background military events unfold. These events are certainly a necessary element told, adding tragedy and contrasting with the childishness and naivety prevailing in the first part.
In addition to the mentioned characters, Cecilia’s younger sister, Briony, plays a vital role in the story’s development. Briony is the youngest and most beloved child in the Tollis family, a little girl with an overly vivid imagination, so useful in her hobby – writing stories. Living, like any writer, in the world she created, she is not always able to draw a clear line between fiction and reality. She is self-centered and constantly but unconsciously strives to be in the spotlight. The reader sees events from the point of view of different characters, but they are all refracted from the point of view of Briony. Thus, for example, Robbie’s account of the scene by the river quietly becomes a suspiciously accurate description of Briony’s feelings, “Minutes later, she was opening it. She was shocked, and not only by a word. In her mind he had betrayed her love by favoring her sister.” (McEwan, 2003, p. 219) The fragment, smoothly extracting from Turner’s story, clearly describes the situation from the point of view of Briony, hinting to the reader that the whole world of the book exists in the head of this little heroine.
Moreover, it is essential to note the book’s second part, purporting to be Robbie’s views of and experiences during the war, is based on the pre-war memories of an adult character. Hence, Robbie replays in his head the incident in the library, which formed the basis of the novel’s plot. The reader learns about this event from an adult’s perspective and realizes that Briony greatly exaggerated and exaggerated what happened. As Briony has had no contact with Robbie since the age of thirteen, the truth of her assertions looks to be quite dubious. Moreover, Cyril Connolly’s letter included in this part is an exemplary representation of postmodernist pastiche. This paper is a forgery, and the phony letter could be interpreted as an unconventional denial or criticism of the concept of originality, as well as a disguised revolt against the postmodern sacralization of artwork and the artist.
Overall, these three weeks’ analepsis is a kind of a geographic transition from Dunkirk to London and a switch in narratives. The transition from the battlefront to the alleys of the war, from combat activities to their repercussions, and from the victim of the original offense to its narrator, labels the gap between the second and the third parts of the novel. As a result of this segmentation, a sensation of remorse and repentance takes the place of defiance and unfairness.
The author deliberately disrupts the sequence of events and confuses the reader. The movement of time – forward or backward – allows the author to keep the reader’s attention. Despite its broader use in cinema, editing is significant in literature. The use of montage gives great freedom in time and space to the entire narrative, allowing you to move from France to England, to take a step from the past to the future. Editing is also used to expose the relationship or emotional state of characters separated by circumstances, such as Robbie and Cecilia’s desire to be together. Thus, McEwen (2003) uses the editing technique to penetrate the character’s inner world, combining subjective and objective narration, thereby exerting the most powerful impact on the reader.
The three fine meandering lines that decorated the vase mentioned at the beginning of the story are the symbolical representation of the vase and the broken urn at the structural level. This symbolizes a mise en abyme of the narrative’s fragmented construction (McEwan, 2003). However, fragmentation affects not just the framework of Briony’s multi-layered story but also her concepts, particularly when she comprehends “the gap that stood between a concept and its realization” (McEwan, 2003, p. 16). Furthermore, as it is known, sarcasm is derived from a Greek word that means tearing off the fresh and can be used to represent hostility in disguise (Miller, 2013). Hence, the novel’s effective use of sarcasm exists prevalently throughout Atonement and represents the break between humor and truth.
The difference between the author’s subtle, equivocal intelligence and the players’ idiocy or ignorance exemplifies this disparity between purpose and behavior, intent and actuality (Miller, 2013). The young girl is believed to have started this contrasting plot development. In the analeptic scene of Briony’s theatrical drowning, a reader remembers how she told him, “I want to thank you for saving my life” (McEwan, 2003). The paradox is twofold in that the adult narrator subsequently admits that her “crash had lasted days, and she instantly forgot it” (McEwan, 2003, p. 124). Briony thanks Robbie by sentencing him to jail and death, thereby contrasting the immortal quality of her emotions, but primarily because her purported gratitude turns out to be of a fatal kind.
When it comes to Cecilia’s proclamation of love that she would wait for Robbie, there is a terrible irony at play as well. The narrator tells him to come back (McEwan, 2003). The passage of time would demonstrate that she meant what she said. The irony is both nuanced (Cecilia waited faithfully) and cruel in that the modal verb ‘would’ unequivocally designates the future in the past as if Cecilia’s incentivized patience was narrative-given. The inability of Briony’s venture being inferred in the hollowness is lexically affiliated with the phrase “chasm” (McEwan, 2003). This further contributes to the fragmentation theme prevalent in the narration.
Fragmentation appears to be the novel’s guiding concept, both structurally and philosophically, whereas “Atonement” seems to illustrate the poetry of disjuncture or fragmented aesthetic. As it has been argued earlier, such fragmentation demonstrates a kind of minimum commitment to the postmodern spirit. This implied form of postmodernism describes the continuing deepening of modernism’s tendencies. The narrator’s decision to use multiple focalizations and the philosophical investigation of the notion and actuality of perception indicates the junction with the contemporary aim. “Atonement” emphasizes the lack of a thorough interpretation of things, the frailty of conscious experience, and the unattainability of expertise, personal or historical. Fragmentation of the second part is necessary to depict all of these through the diversification and disconnection of the fictional viewpoints.
References
McEwan, I. (2003). Atonement: A Novel (1st ed.). Anchor Books.
Miller, J. H. (2013). Some Versions of Romance Trauma as Generated by Realist Detail in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (pp. 100-116). Routledge.