Essay
A* Atonement Exemplar Essay 6
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'Robbie Turner is a victim of circumstance.' To what extent do you agree with this view?
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Atonement practice essay 6'Robbie Turner is a victim of circumstance.' To what extent do you agree with this view?
In order to declare with certainty that Robbie Turner is a victim of circumstance in
Atonement, we would have to ignore the deliberate actions taken by Briony Tallis and perhaps her
mother to incriminate him in addition to the passivity of the other characters and the Police, all of
which could establish Robbie as a victim of a conspiracy to make him accountable for the rape of
Lola Quincey. Despite this, given Briony’s young age and McEwan’s use of fate and determinist
ideology to precede the injustice done to Robbie both in 1935 and in the war in 1940, there is still a
credible case to be made for the view that Robbie is overall a victim of circumstance in the novel.
Indeed, throughout Part One, it could be argued that McEwan utilises ideas from fate and
determinist ideology to create circumstances that make Briony’s crime inevitable. Firstly, one must
consider the question of the protagonist’s age; we are told in the first chapter that ‘Briony inhabited
an ill-defined space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed
unpredictably’. With themes of adulthood vs childhood proving a recurring aspect of McEwan’s
works (featuring heavily in The Child in Time for example), we see here how Briony’s position on the
brink of adulthood brings about the circumstances that lead to her crime. Unaware of how the adult
world functions, yet desperate to gain the approval of its inhabitants, Briony’s age at the time of the
crime can be considered an essential circumstance of which Robbie is ultimately a victim, as Briony
arguably incriminates him in order to impress adults and be the centre of attention. Her motivations
for accusing Robbie of raping Lola appear to be founded on a chain of misunderstandings – the first
link of which can be traced back to the fountain scene involving Robbie and Cecilia. It is said that
‘only chance had brought her to the window’, which strongly supports the view that Robbie is overall
a victim of circumstance given that, if Briony was never at the window at that exact moment, she
would never have seen what she perceived as Robbie’s domineering and abusive character. In her
‘readerly’ (Barthes, 1970) writing style at this stage in the novel, Briony attempts to shape our own
reaction in her description of Robbie, who ‘raised his hand imperiously’. The adverb here indicates
Briony’s misunderstanding which catalyses her view of Robbie as a ‘maniac’ and ultimately makes
her crime possible. The sense that the crime could all have been avoided if it weren’t for Briony’s
presence at the window at that moment gives credence to the view that Robbie is a victim of
circumstance as opposed to a wider conspiracy to incriminate him.
It is also vital to consider McEwan’s use of pathetic fallacy in Part One and the subsequently
claustrophobic effect this has. Immediately, we are told that the ‘morning’s colossal heat was
oppressive’, with the latter adjective serving to emphasise how the high temperatures are not
welcome and instead provide an unsettling sense of entrapment. It is possible to suggest that this
gives rise to the calamitous events of the night – a view supported by Emily’s quote from her mother
that ‘hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people’. Again, this is testament to the
circumstances created by McEwan prior to Briony’s crime, which all come together to victimise
Robbie. In addition, the occasional interjection of the retrospective voice in the narrative serves to
further establish Robbie as a victim of circumstance; his ‘decision’ to ‘go out searching alone’, ‘as he
was to acknowledge many times, transformed his life’. Such a minor and seemingly unimportant
choice leaves Robbie without an alibi and with the theoretical opportunity to have committed the
crime. The older voice recognises that this decision composes the circumstantial evidence needed to
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