These notes cover the main aspects of crime in McEwan's 'Atonement', namely crime, murder and violence, criminal psyche, victims, suspense, detection, punishment/justice, social commentary and setting. Each aspect also includes key quotes that relate to it. It also has notes on the structure of the...
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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Elements of Crime Writing
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Atonement – Aspects of Crime
Crime, murder and violence
• Rape of a minor
• Briony’s crime of lying to the police and withholding evidence
• Lola’s crime – everything put into motion by Briony could have been stopped by Lola. It could be argued that
Lola’s silence is by far the worse crime
• War – crime against humanity
- ‘Assume 100,000 tons of bombs dropped in two weeks. Result: five million casualties’
- ‘it was a leg in a tree…small enough to be a child’s’
- ‘there were horrors enough’
- ‘when they shut their [French brothers] eyes, they saw those mutilated bodies’
- ‘A whole army was fleeing to the coast, armed with cigarettes to keep the hunger away’
- ‘Who would care? Who could ever describe this confusion…and begin to assign the blame? No one
would ever know what it was like to be here. Without the details there could be no larger picture’
- ‘hunt down a sprinting man for the sport of it’
- ‘they were too dazed, they were in shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every
man, corned and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be lived
through all over again and the fear did not diminish’
- ‘men who could barely walk for their blisters…an officer, unconscious or dead…his bloodied legs
dangled uselessly’
- ‘They passed the walking wounded who could go no further. They sat like beggars at the side of the
road, calling out for help, or for a mouthful of water. Others just lay by the ditch, unconscious, or lost in
hopelessness’
- ‘What were they expected to do? Carry a dozen men on their backs when they could barely walk
themselves?’
- ‘a chaotic retreat’
- ‘everyone had suffered, and now someone was going to pay’
- ‘he had broken his back, someone said, but there was nothing anyone could do, and no men were
stepping over him’
- ‘to survive was to be selfish’
- ‘they looked identical, a wild race of men from a terrible world. The ones who were standing appeared
to be asleep’
- ‘his blueish toes stank…his head was wrapped in a bandage soaked to crimson and black…his
battledress was mangled into a wound…white protuberance of bone. Each step they took gave him
pain…silent agony’
- ‘Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so…he couldn’t bear the
pain, he had to have the water’
- ‘it was the burned-out remains of a human they lifted onto the be. She thought he could never survive.
- ‘the irreparable damage’
- ‘mostly they were angry with the ‘brass’, and with their officers for abandoning them in the retreat, and
with the French for collapsing without a fight. They were bitter about the newspaper celebrations of the
miracle evacuation and the heroism of the little boats’
- ‘the collective insanity of war’
• Crime against the reader – narrative structure might be considered to be a crime against the reader’s
expectations
- ‘There was a crime. But there were also the lovers’
Criminal Psyche
• Briony wants to have the world ‘just so’ and she enjoys making stories that fit with her sense of order. She can’t
accept that ‘Not everything had a cause…. Some things were simply so.’
Victims
• Lola – raped, broken home, unhappy marriage (?), successful and privileged life. Little attention is given to her
as a victim, instead she becomes a part to the crime of falsely accusing Robbie
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