(A*) The usage of time within Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' and W.H. Auden's poetry (English Literature OCR)
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Course
Literature post-1900
Institution
OCR
In this essay I explore the ways in which Auden and McEwan explore time in their portrayals of mid-20th century Britain. I explore several ideas, such as the idea that time brings knowledge and morality, by drawing links between The Trials of Arabella, 'As I Walked Out One Evening', and alluding to...
‘Compare and contrast the ways in which W. H. Auden and Ian McEwan explore the impact
of time in their portrayals of mid-twentieth century Britain.’
Both Auden and McEwan suggest that time is an inevitable and unavoidable force that brings
knowledge of the world, changing characters from a state of innocence to a state of maturity,
paralleling the story of the ‘Garden of Eden’. However, the change in morality it brings is
questionable; both Briony and the lovers in ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ show dubious
moral improvement despite time removing them from the comforts of a naive world.
Furthermore, both writers suggest time should be viewed as a reminder of our own mortality
by developing the Stoic theory of ‘memento mori’. This is particularly explored through the
idleness of Robbie and Cecilia, and the protagonist of ‘A Summer Night’, who waste time
before learning that time is finite. Even so, both writers suggest that love can create a
microcosm in which time can – momentarily – be escaped: For instance, Robbie and Cecilia’s
romance exists in small microcosms of memory during the war, which is similar to the
ephemeral moment shared in ‘Lullaby’. In these instances, love could be viewed as a
consolation against the inevitability of time.
Both Auden and McEwan suggest time brings knowledge and morality, showing the human
experience of maturity as presented in the ‘Garden of Eden’. Initially, both the lover of ‘As I
Walked Out Evening’ and Briony misrepresent the world through their naivety. Briony, as a
child on the cusp of adolescence, can only perceive the world around her with the limited lens
of fairy tales. This is best exemplified through The Trials of Arabella, in which McEwan
presents Briony’s self-indulgent nature: by Briony’s own admission, the heroine’s thoughts
‘were Briony’s thoughts’. Later, Briony aligns herself with the heroine, Arabella; who, just
like her, is naive and ‘spontaneous’. The epigraph to Atonement also depicts a heroine who
has been raised in a similar situation to Briony; Christian, English, and educated. The speaker
questions Miss Morland, and asks her ‘what have you been judging from?’1. Critic Juliette
Wells describes her as ‘a girl so full of the delights of Gothic fiction that she causes havoc
around her when she imagines an innocent man to be capable of terrible things’2. McEwan’s
use of intertextuality creates parallels to Briony, and shows how a naive world based in
fiction is distorted by time. Likewise, Auden’s lover views the world naively. This is evident
1
Austen, J. Northanger Abbey
2
Wells, J., 2008. Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, [online] 30. Available at:
<https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA199801402&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=
08210314&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ef601cbb0> [Accessed 30 March 2022].
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