The Novel Atonement, By Ian Mcewan

The novel Atonement by Ian McEwan displays through the stories of Briony Tallis, Robbie Turner, and Lola Quincey that fervently hanging onto a belief can sustain and contrastingly destroy. A headstrong and determined girl with a fantastical imagination, Briony Tallis ultimately triggers despair. Constrained by her youth and innocence, Briony witnesses certain events that transpire between her sister and Robbie Turner without fully understanding them and draws her own conclusions. These conclusions manifest into a singular belief, the belief that Robbie Turner is “a maniac…bound to go for the most vulnerable” (Ewan, 158). Consequently, Briony’s misguided machination of Robbie as a monster leads her to convince herself that Robbie was Lola’s assailant, and “a ruthless youthful forgetting, a willful erasing, protected her well into her teens” (160) from the knowledge that she was not truly able to see Lola’s attacker in the darkness of the night.
The state convicts Robbie and he is stripped of his dignity, separated from his love, Cecelia, sent to prison, and later drafted into World War Two where he will perish. Although Robbie meets his end in Dunkirk during World War II he almost survives, and his survival hinges on one lasting, passionate belief. Robbie’s sanity is rooted in his unwavering faith that Cecelia will “wait for [him]” and he treats this sentiment “like a sacred site” (213). Despite the countless, horrifying atrocities Robbie is subjected to during the retreat to Dunkirk he soldiers on to “find Cecelia and love her, marry her and live without shame”