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Summary AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE B - CRIME WRITING ATONEMENT NOTES - Context Notes
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Context and IdeasThe concept of atonement refers to making up for one's sins. It is a crucial idea in Roman
Catholicism which is referenced in the novel. The novel involves coming to terms with one's own
altered self and accepting what has happened - 'at-one-ment'. The narrator Briory experiences
a problematic journey in dealing with her sins and mistakes but other characters follow a similar
pattern. Atonement is a reflexive novel and a work of metafiction which focuses on the process
of writing - such as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. As McEwan examines the process of
writing we examine the process of our own reading and relationship to the narrator and author.
Atonement gives deeply distressing depictions of violence and the horrors of battle
with unrelenting images of injury, distress as McEwan uses horror to explore moral
questions. McEwans father was an army officer which gave him insight into war and
army life.
Briory does not reveal herself as the narrator until the end of the novel which forces a
reevaluation into all that we have read. Briory has proved to be an unreliable witness
and it is finally revealed that she is suffering from dementia at the end of the novel. We
are left with a very fluid idea of what has happened and what every means to us now.
McEwan demonstrated interest in the morality of political regimes in the late 20th
century.
Key Themes
Unreliable narrator
Effects of war on human behaviour
Nature of forgiveness
How to achieve atonement
Guilt and Remorse
Money and Social Class
Process of writing
Relationship between past and present
Ability to separate fact from fiction
Love and War
Melodrama and misunderstandings
At the beginning of atonement McEwan includes a quote from Austen's Northanger Abbey
where the heroine Catherine is an avid reader of Gothic novels and has difficulty
understanding the boundaries between reality and fiction. In the quotation Catherine is
reprimanded for allowing her imagination to run wild this way.
In Atonement the story is told my many characters as McEwan uses narrative layers so we
hear events from different characters.
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