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Summary Atonement - Chapter Summaries
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These are detailed chapter summaries which bullet point the plot and include key points or quotes for each of the settings, characters and themes in each chapter.
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Lecture Notes on Ian McEwan
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Atonement revision booklet for AQA A Level English Lit B
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To what extent do you agree with the view that Briony deserves her punishment for the crime she commits?
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Atonement Chapter SummariesAtonement Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1 (pp. 3-17)
Plot
• Explains the play that Briony has written The Trials of Arabella which is extremely childish
• The cousins from the north arrive and Briony is desperate to get them rehearsing for her play she has written
for Leon’s homecoming
• During the rehearsal, there is a ‘power struggle’ between Lola and Briony
Setting
• Tallis’ house – nursery
Characters
Briony Tallis
• She’s shown to be impulsive, committed, intense and extremely imaginative
• Demands attention from her family
• She is bored and desperate for a secret to make her life more interesting
- ‘written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch’
- ‘she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft’
- ‘Briony studies her mother’s face for every trace of shifting emotion, and Emily Tallis obliged’
- ‘[the play] was for her brother, to celebrate his return, provoke his admiration and guide him away
from his careless succession of girlfriends towards the right sort of wife, the one who would persuade
him to return to the countryside’
- ‘one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so’
- ‘a passion for secrets’
- ‘the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the
reckless possibilities of wrongdoing’
- ‘she did not have it in her to be cruel’
- ‘nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding’
- ‘only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it
resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world could she feel immune’
- ‘the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words’
- ‘unapologetically demanding her family’s total attention as she cast her narrative spell’
- ‘writing stories not only involved secrecy, but it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation’
- ‘her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so’
- ‘a love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of
housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward
withheld until the final page’
- ‘like re-armament and the Abyssinia Question and gardening, [divorce] was simply not a subject’
- [‘It’t just showing off’] ‘Briony knew he had a point. This was precisely why she loved plays, or hers
at least; everyone would adore her’
- ‘it had never occurred to her that her cousins would not want to play their parts’
- ‘She wanted to lie down alone, face-down on her bed and savour the vile piquancy of the moment,
and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began’
- ‘Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to liver under hedges, eat berries
and speak to no one’
- ‘self-pity needed her full attention’
- ‘In a generally pleasant and well-protected life, she had never really confronted anyone before’
- ‘Briony began to understand the chasm that laid between an idea and its execution’
Lola (and Jackson and Pierrot)
• 15 years old – still a child
• Parents are going through a divorce so they have come to stay with the Tallis’
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