Alternate Ending In Ian Mccwan's Atonement

If people were given the chance to take their whole life story and change the ending, no doubt that many would immediately get to writing what they deemed their perfect end would be. They would themselves happier. They would right their wrongs, go after the love of their life, not get sick, get revenge, say good-bye – do anything that they wanted to do differently. Anything they chose to not include would cease to exist, and what was written wouldn’t be questioned because there wouldn’t be a reason to not take it as the truth. The point of an alternate ending is to change an outcome of a situation; to replace the original truth with another. In Ian McCwan’s novel Atonement, the protagonist, Briony, drastically changes the end of her book,
In a novel like Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolff, the timespan of the story is only one day, but it plays with multiple streams of consciousness during the same events. I wrote an alternate version of the party scene in Mrs. Dalloway from the Sally Seton’s stream of consciousness. I didn’t change any part of the plot that was already known to the readers, but switched to Sally’s perspective because I found her such a fun and intriguing character. Briony’s alternate ending severed her story’s sense of reality by writing an ending the polar opposite of what she really experienced. Readers are strung along by Atonement’s plot and drama, so it’s rather disappointing to feel so relieved and hopeful that Cecilia and Robbie managed to find their way back to each other, just to find out that those emotions were evoked by something fake. Perhaps I’m not reading Briony and McCwan’s reasoning the way they intended, but I could never ignore the truth in favor of writing an end that conflicted with everything else in the world I built. When I was writing “For There She Was (Revisited)”, my ultimate goal was to make Sally’s thoughts seems as authentic as possible, so that I could try and create a just tribute to the character Wolff brought to