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Summary AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE B - CRIME WRITING ATONEMENT NOTES - Literary Critics
AQA ENGLISH LITERATURE B - CRIME WRITING ATONEMENT NOTES Literature Critics for the novel.
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Literary Critics"McEwan's novel may not merely evoke a traumatic encounter but may also be productive
of symptoms associated with this experience in their actuality." (Paul Croswaite)
Crime
"atonement hinges on just such misunderstanding" (Mazzeno)
"In attempt to atone for her crime...she turns to what induced her to cause the tragedy in
the first place: fiction.." Briony's novel is thus her atonement, a way she can give her sister
and her medical prince what she deprived them of in reality.' (Dahlbach)
"the use of metafiction in the book serves to undermine the naturalisation of social and
economic inequalities that especially characterised British society in the 1930's. Every
time a character misinterprets the situation it proves to be the consequence of a faulty
projection on his or her part onto another character" (Finnely)
"Well, either you do violence, or you sentimentalise it I was hoping that the reader by the
end of Atonement would feel some kind of uplift 'I don't think of it as a crime" (McEwan)
The atonement is in the sense of reconciliation - "she is at one with herself". (Ian McEwan)
"Her work of fiction must make up for and confess the wrong that she has done." (Mullan)
"I sometimes feel that every sentence contains a ghostly commentary of its own process"
(McEwan).
"She is burying her conscience beneath a stream of consciousness".
"I wanted to play with the notion of story telling as a form of self justification, of how much
courage is involved in telling the truth to ones self".
Narrative Style
Modernism
Structuralism
Poststructuralism
"Narrative voice and point of view are indispensable parts of story-telling" (Pei Wang)
"McEwan uses letters as a structure - meta-narrative" (Clarissa)
"Small details are a way into the horror." (McEwan)
McEwan wants you to identify with the character, to succumb to narrative illusion (John
Mullan on Narrative Illusion)
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