Atonement - Study Notes
Overview
There is no disguise about the primary theme of Atonement - it’s there for us to see in bold in the title. This is a novel about guilt and forgiveness. But it’s a tricky thing this process of atonement
(“But what was guilt these days,” Robbie asks at one point. “It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one”) - and this novel looks at what creates the context for guilt in the first place, how do we share this guilt and how do we atone for it?
The novel might best be described as meta-textual: it is a book, above all, about the act of writing and representation. This, essentially, is the process of atonement that Briony must go through - to both represent what happened and how it happened, but moreover to reflect critically throughout on the process of this representation. Texts are everywhere in Atonement - from the quote from
Northanger Abbey (Austen’s famous satire of the gothic novel in which a young women mistakenly believes a crime has happened) at the beginning; the melodramatic Trials of Arabella in the first section of the novel, the plot of which (a princess “judiciously” marries a “medical prince”) reflects on the relationship of Robbie and Cecilia; Robbie’s first letter to Cecilia which reveals his true feelings; his beloved Housman (a poet whose most famous collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad, follows the themes of death and mortality for youth in rural England - a theme which Robbie and
Cecilia come to live out); through to Briony’s very own consciously fictionalised account of what happened between her, Robbie and Cecilia.
To begin with in the novel, we assume the narrator is an omniscient, anonymous and objective third person - untied to the events. The trick of the novel is that it is really a first person account, passed off as a third person narrative. It is always Briony’s reflection on what happened. At the end of the first section of the novel, we have come to judge her harshly. After all, the narrator has so
There is no disguise about the primary theme of Atonement - it’s there for us to see in bold in the title. This is a novel about guilt and forgiveness. But it’s a tricky thing this process of atonement
(“But what was guilt these days,” Robbie asks at one point. “It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one”) - and this novel looks at what creates the context for guilt in the first place, how do we share this guilt and how do we atone for it?
The novel might best be described as meta-textual: it is a book, above all, about the act of writing and representation. This, essentially, is the process of atonement that Briony must go through - to both represent what happened and how it happened, but moreover to reflect critically throughout on the process of this representation. Texts are everywhere in Atonement - from the quote from
Northanger Abbey (Austen’s famous satire of the gothic novel in which a young women mistakenly believes a crime has happened) at the beginning; the melodramatic Trials of Arabella in the first section of the novel, the plot of which (a princess “judiciously” marries a “medical prince”) reflects on the relationship of Robbie and Cecilia; Robbie’s first letter to Cecilia which reveals his true feelings; his beloved Housman (a poet whose most famous collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad, follows the themes of death and mortality for youth in rural England - a theme which Robbie and
Cecilia come to live out); through to Briony’s very own consciously fictionalised account of what happened between her, Robbie and Cecilia.
To begin with in the novel, we assume the narrator is an omniscient, anonymous and objective third person - untied to the events. The trick of the novel is that it is really a first person account, passed off as a third person narrative. It is always Briony’s reflection on what happened. At the end of the first section of the novel, we have come to judge her harshly. After all, the narrator has so