I thought this was a potential question for this year's exam but it didn't come up. I scored 22/25 on this essay. It could possibly come up in future exams.
‘Briony is presented by McEwan as a victim of her own
imagination’.
Akin to crime narratives, the victims are often positioned at the centre of
the plot. However, as a postmodern metafictional novel, McEwan sidelines
the constructs of Lola Quincey and Robbie Turner, placing Briony at the
‘centre’ of the novel, focusing upon her suffering and perhaps implying
that she is the true victim of the novel. McEwan arguably utilises the
metafictional status of the novel to explore the meaning of fiction and the
gap between what is imagined and what is true. However, it could also be
argued that Briony is a victim of her developing sexuality and these new
feelings lead to her misunderstanding the situation and subsequently the
relationship between Robbie and Cecilia, as she navigates the precipice
between childhood and adulthood. Therefore, McEwan poses the question
whether Briony is a victim of her own imagination or instead, her
blossoming sexuality, both of which accelerate her crime and cause her to
suffer as a victim, as she attempts to atone for her sin, throughout the
novel.
Like Frayn’s ‘JL’ in ‘The Trick of It’ who utilises the people around her as
material for her writing, Briony’s inhabitancy of a world of fiction and
drama exacerbates her crime and portrays her as a victim of her
imagination. From the very outset of novel, the epilogue which references
Austen’s ‘Northanger Abbey’ immediately presents Briony as a victim of
her imagination. Catherine Morland, mentioned in the epigraph, and the
heroine of the novel, also possesses a distorted view of reality fed by
literature, according to Hidalgo. Truthfully, Briony’s imagination causes her
to misread an intimate moment between Robbie and Cecilia at the
‘fountain’ that feeds her mendacity and causes her to give false
information leading to the wrongful arrest of Robbie. When observing the
scene at the fountain, Briony questions Robbie’s power, ‘What strange
power did he have over her? Blackmail? Threats?’. McEwan deliberately
utilises the omniscient narration combined with the semantic field of
crime to imply that she inhabits a world of fiction which distorts her
perception of reality. The single word sentences emphasise her warped
imagination and her desire for drama. Moreover, the epithet ‘maniac’
which she refers to Robbie exposes her status as a victim of her
overactive imagination. The This predatory and pejorative epithet echoes
the misconstrued view that Briony possesses as a result of her own
imagination. Many critics, like Finney, point to the dangers of entering a
world of fiction and attribute the ‘fairy stories’ as a weakness that
culminates in her status as a tragic victim. Her failure to grasp reality
engenders the need for her to retreat into a fictional world to make sense
of the complexity of the emerging relationship between Robbie and
Cecilia. The novel raises the question as to whether Briony can be fully
accountable for her crime or whether she is a victim of fiction and her
desire to have the world ‘just so’. However, some critics suggest she is a
victim as she is the product of her own environment, with an absent father
and a mother who deliberately ‘shuts herself’ away from her
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