It fits quite nicely with her new sense of herself as grown up. The police arrive and interview Briony, who relishes her position as the sole witness. Despite enjoying her central role, the evening is hazy for Briony. She remembers the doctor coming and people whispering amongst themselves in small groups; she remembers Paul Marshall showing up.
Cecilia keeps to the peripheries, chain smoking and silent with bloodshot eyes. We can't say we blame the poor girl—she's in the middle of a pretty rough run. Oh yeah—the twins are still missing, so search parties are sent out to look for them while everyone awaits Robbie's return and Jack Tallis's arrival home. While waiting, Briony suddenly gets the idea to show everyone the letter Robbie gave Cecilia. Without asking Cecilia. Guess what?
After the cops, Leon and Emily read the letter, Cecilia notices what's going on and is outraged. There are also five main settings, each with its own morality and each making its own contribution to the novel as a crime text. The country house, in which McEwan chooses to set part one, is a typical setting for crime fiction of the early twentieth century.
The wealthy Tallis family and its guests see themselves as superior to the law, unwilling to call the police when the twins run away and only contacting them when they think the lower class Robbie is guilty of raping Lola.
For the most part the law seems answerable to them. The second setting is Northern France during the retreat to Dunkirk. It is a similarly lawless place, the focus for the terrible crime of war, and on a smaller scale a place where petty crime and insubordination are overlooked. Briony's hospital is the third setting, one which befits Briony's needs to try to find reparation: it is a place of both misery and comfort, wounds and healing. In a neat final twist, McEwan chooses to make the final setting a return to the Tallis' country mansion, now Tilney's Hotel, for a family reunion.
It is in this setting that Briony completes her story at five in the morning she is still at her writing desk where she tells us that this whole tale has been her attempt to repair the damage of her crime by changing the ending. Her fiction in which Robbie and Cecilia live and are still in love she sees as 'a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion'. But in this setting, the crime against the reader is most pronounced. McEwan chooses the name Tilney's Hotel deliberately - its connection to the epigraph and Austen's Northanger Abbey the Tilney home a reminder that stories are not to be trusted.
Paul Marshall is the novel's villain, though interestingly McEwan chooses to somewhat marginalise his criminality. He is given relatively little space in the novel and he is not pursued and punished. Briony speculates on the possibility of his feeling guilt 'perhaps he has spent a lifetime making amends' , but in every obvious way he is a criminal who gets away with it.
His crime is a dreadful one: he rapes a minor, a young girl who is outside searching for her twin brothers who have run away. Marshall is rich and privileged and even as a young man he is a successful business man making chocolate bars. When he is given a voice or presence in the novel he is insistent, commanding and a bore when Cecilia takes the visitors into the garden he takes control of the conversation with 'a ten minute monologue'.
It seems that he wants Britain to go to war with Germany so that he can increase his business empire the army will buy his chocolate bars for the soldiers. There is nothing attractive about him. His arrogance is evident in his disparaging of Robbie because of his working class roots and it is therefore not surprising that after his crime he uses his class privilege in his dealings with the police and the family and lets Robbie take the blame.
Although much is made of Briony's crime, little is said of Paul Marshall's. Eventually it emerges that he marries Lola, a union in which Briony feels implicated. By the end of the story, Marshall is even richer, now a lord and very well respected he has a Foundation and does good work for medical research , but he has untold crimes and even Briony cannot publish her novel of the truth because publication could lead to litigation.
So he gets away scot free. Perhaps McEwan suggests that this is like life and the privileged have more opportunity to evade detection.
Lola, the victim of Marshall's crime is also somewhat sidelined in terms of her victim status. This is perhaps because the story is told through Briony and Briony is concerned with her own position as criminal and her own need to repair the damage done to Robbie. As a result Lola, like Marshall, is rather on the edge of the text. This is a foreshadowing and further representation of the idea that the Quincey boys are interchangeable with Corporals Nettles and Mace. Here we have Robbie leading them from the wilderness back to the home front in safety.
Robbie as "hero" to the narrator's eyes stretches beyond that fateful night in and into the war. It is Nettles in the end who shares Robbie's letters with Briony so she can accurately write the war section of the book, and it is Pierrot in the end who finally organized the "Trials of Arabella" to be played out in full. The Question and Answer section for Atonement is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
Ideas why Briony misunderstands? How does the war enable as well as hinder Briony from atoning? What is significant about Robbie? Atonement study guide contains a biography of Ian McEwan, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Atonement essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Atonement by Ian McEwan. Remember me. Why do you think Briony lied?
To answer questions about Atonement , please sign up. Showing that it was just a childish crush and not any kind of motive which Robbie suspects at one point.
So to Briony, Robbie must have been sexually obsessed and had some kind of evil power that her sister was powerless against as was evident, to her, by findin them in the library.
I think it becomes clear in the description of the legal proceedings that she starts to doubt herself then. Write a comment
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