Introduction
Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a novel about the young girl’s tragic mistake, her adult life in the shadow of that mistake, and her attempts at atonement. The author uses a mix of classic and postmodern techniques to make a statement about atonement, the relationship between life and fiction, the role of the author, and the nature of fiction. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the novel’s structure and the narrative strategy used by the author and establish how they help to develop the novel’s main ideas.
Main Body
The novel is divided into four parts, each taking place in a different period: 1935 England, France, and England during the Second World War, and present-day England. The fourth part is the postscript set in 1999 London, in which it is revealed that the events of the preceding two sections of the novel have never happened in real life. The narrator, Briony, turns out to be a 77-year-old successful writer who describes the tragic mistake that she made in her childhood and the fictitious course of events that allowed her to atone for that mistake.
Ian McEwan creates a multi-level narrative using a mix of classic and postmodern techniques. The first three sections of the novel are seemingly told by a third-person reliable narrator accounting for the development of a tragic love story from 1935 to 1940. The postscript is written in first person and the present tense, presenting the reader with a first-person unreliable narrator, the 77-year-old Briony, who confesses to having written the previous sections as an act of atonement. From the structural point of view, the novel can be viewed as comprised of two different texts: Briony’s Atonement, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The former is the classic novel on the theme of atonement, while the latter is a postmodern deliberation on the nature of fiction and the role of the author.
Ian McEwan uses the unreliable narrator technique, separating the personalities of the author and the storyteller. There are several reasons for which Briony can be considered an unreliable narrator. First, she deliberately lies in the first section of the novel, framing an innocent person, which makes readers doubt whether she can be trusted as the story develops. Second, in the postscript, she is an old woman and suffers from dementia, which implies that she probably cannot remember the events correctly. Third, she has been writing this story throughout her whole life: “The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different drafts” (McEwan 343). Ian McEwan depicts Briony as the author who creates her alternative reality and uses her writing powers to convince readers that it is what happened. She is altering the actual story to achieve her own creative and psychological purposes, making it an act of atonement.
Briony’s character is developed throughout the novel and fully revealed in the postscript. Even as a child, Briony is aware of the power one has with the pen. She understands that as a writer, she can spoil lives and restore love: “…falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance” (McEwan 5). Submerged in this idea, she perceives and transforms everything that happens around her to serve the demands of her imagination. Confusing life and fiction, she recreates what she believes in, and the consequences turn out to be tragic. In her later life, she attempts to use her writing powers to correct the mistakes that her imagination made her commit. Being unable to change the past, she seeks to achieve atonement by creating her interpretation of events.
Atonement is a postmodern novel that makes the reader aware of the methods by which the text is created and involves them in the process of narration. In the last section of Atonement, Briony reflects on how she has been writing her novel, inviting the reader to share her interpretation of events. She writes, “I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love” (McEwan 345). Suffering from the consequences of her childhood inability to separate reality and fiction, Briony makes the reader confuse her story with reality.
Conclusion
On one level, Atonement is a novel about the nature of writing, the role of the author, and the relationship between life and fiction. On another level, it is a multi-layered tale of atonement and different ways to achieve it. Both these ideas are reflected in the novel’s structure, in which fiction is confused with reality and the text is used to atone for mistakes that cannot otherwise be corrected. Ian McEwan uses a mix of classic and postmodern techniques and an unreliable narrator to encourage the readers to make their conclusions.
Work Cited
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003.