An A-Level English Literature Essay from the Elements of Crime section of the course, focusing on Atonement. Answers the question: To What Extent Do You Agree that McEwan Present Briony as a Sympathetic Character? Graded 25/25 (A*) by my teacher.
Atonement revision booklet for AQA A Level English Lit B
To what extent do you agree with the view that Briony deserves her punishment for the crime she commits?
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English Literature B
Elements of Crime Writing
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To What Extent Do You Agree that McEwan Present Briony as a Sympathetic
Character? 1/1/18
Overall, although the reader can see that Briony does suffer in the novel and can, therefore,
gain some sympathy from the reader, she is not a wholly sympathetic character. McEwan
chooses to write his novel from Briony’s perspective which enables the reader to see her
dual outlook of craving forgiveness mixed with her own self-hatred. However, she is an
extremely unreliable narrator as her aim is to achieve atonement so she is trying to get the
reader to sympathise with her and forgive her for her crime which at times may make a
reader sympathise with her. However, the cyclical structure of the novel is reflected not
only in the setting and action but also in Briony’s character. At the end, she is revealed to
have just as fanciful an imagination as she did as a child and she also still doesn’t truly
understand the consequences of what she did. Because this is the end of the novel, the
reader is left feeling contempt towards Briony which ultimately means that she is not a
sympathetic character.
Briony’s motive or reason for her original crime, perverting the course of justice through her
lie about seeing Robbie assaulting Lola, can be interpreted in different ways. Briony is
presented by McEwan as a somewhat lonely child who receives little attention from her
family; this allows her imagination to run wild and causes her to live in her fantasies. She is
also just a child who is trying to make sense of ‘rites and conventions she knew nothing
about’ and because she doesn’t feel as though she can talk to anyone in her family about
what she has seen she is left to her ‘confusion and misunderstanding’. Because of her
misinterpretation and youth, it is easy for the reader to understand why Briony came to the
conclusion that she did, and therefore they may be inclined to feel sympathy for her as it
seems that ‘she had not intended to mislead, she hadn’t acted out of malice’, she had
simply misunderstood.
However, as much of part one is narrated by Briony, the reader is quickly introduced to her
‘passion for secrets’, her ‘desire to have the world just so’ and her need to ‘discover the
stories’. We also come to realise that ‘nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting’ to fulfil
her imaginative expectations which causes her to actively search for something interesting
to write about that would fit with her sense of order. Before the crime is even committed,
she has labelled Robbie as a ‘maniac’ and a ‘villain’ who threatens both her sister and her
household which causes her to name Robbie as the perpetrator because she has already
decided that he was a bad person and therefore it made sense to her that he must be the
criminal of her story. In this way, the reader is less likely to feel sympathy for Briony because
it suggests that she manipulated the situation so that it would fit into her story. A further
possible motive behind Briony’s crime is her desire to be the centre of attention and to feel
as though she is important. She ‘unapologetically demand[ed] her family’s total attention as
she cast her narrative spell’ when reading out her stories and she gets a similar feeling of
pleasure when she is ‘listened to [and] deferred to’ on the night of the attack. Briony has a
sense of enjoyment from the event, seeming not to comprehend the gravity of her actions
or the horrific crime committed against her cousin, which causes the reader to be a little
sickened by her, limiting the amount of sympathy available for her. The truth is that ‘Yes,
she was just a child. But not every child sends a man to prison with a lie’ – it took a child like
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