Essays on Atonement

In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left doubting nearly everything they have...

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”-Psalms 82:6 It is an impossible task for an author not to project his or her own private biases onto a page. Theistic writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien...

In Ian McEwan’s award winning novel Atonement young Briony Tallis must try and make amends for her wrongdoings toward her older sister Cecelia and her love interest, Robbie. At the end of the novel, the short, twenty-page coda entitled “London, 1999” proves surprisingly necessary for...

Theater and acting fundamentally allow people to become something else- to transcend the bounds of their identities and present, or be presented with, a different reality. The process of writing, a theme particularly prominent in ‘Atonement’, is arguably comparable to acting- they both permit a...

In Atonement, McEwan reveals in the final section, ‘London, 1999,’ that the previous narrative had been a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and calling into question all the previous events the reader had assumed were objectively true. McEwan first signals...

British novelist Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement can be appropriately compared to American writer Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men with the common denominating theme of intense experience—its opportunities and its ramifications. Contrastingly, each author chooses to present the motif by utilizing an entirely...

How does McEwan use time in the first ten chapters? In Atonement McEwan uses time in various ways in order to explore various perspectives, relationships and to try piece together the events that occur in the first section of the book. The timing of various...

Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a romantic war tragedy metafiction published in 2001. The novel follows the lives of the young lovers Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, the story’s two protagonists whom experience the text’s conflict as they are never able to fulfill their dreams of...

Through a critical reading of an excerpt from the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan, many formal and stylised characteristics can be identified in assisting the success with which the novel delivers it’s themes to the readers. Some of the techniques used in this specific excerpt...

Ian McEwan portrays a theme of architectural detail throughout his novel Atonement. Through the use of these descriptions, McEwan constructs the theme of guilt, and the quest of finding atonement, that follows through his main character, Briony Tallis. Briony, who is a writer, writes these...