Literature and Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Literature and Ian McEwan’s Atonement

1. Introduction

Ian McEwan’s Atonement, published in 2001, is widely considered his masterpiece to date and a breakthrough in his literary career. It is a novel in which the main character and author, Briony Tallis, tells a story of her life and the lives she destroyed and reinvented with her stories. Following the storyline spanning nearly sixty years, Atonement falls under Bildungsroman’s category that not only delves into the psyche of a “young girl at the dawn of her selfhood” (295) but also explores her lifelong attempt to atone for the tragedies that she caused. However, it is much more than a cliché story of growing up with mistakes, regrets, and hard-learned lessons. Using metafictional techniques, the author draws the readers out of the narrow confines of the story structure to seriously contemplate the purpose and power of literature in modern society.

In an interview with Newsweek, McEwan refers to Atonement as “my Jane Austen novel” (Giles, 62), and Juliette Wells expounds on Austen’s influence on McEwan’s novel in “Shades of Austen in McEwan’s Atonement” (2008). She argues that by way of both exploring the intertextual references, allusions to Austen and implying parallel between Briony and Austen, McEwan restores Austen “to her position as a central author of the English literary canon” and also “consolidates his position in that canon as well, a position that may not be so distant from Austen’s” (108). Besides its pointed reference to Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), there are multitudinous intertextual resonances and interweaving of tales in this novel. As is confessed by McEwan in an interview in Conversations with Ian McEwan (2010), “It’s a novel full of other writers—not only Briony of course, who’s stalked, haunted by the figures of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, but Robbie too has a relationship, a deep relationship with writing and storytelling” (85). Accordingly, it is no exaggeration to say that Atonement is fiction about literature and its significance.

The values and workings of literature in Atonement have been seized on by a minority of scholars. Brian Finney (2004) reads, “this novel as a work of fiction that is from beginning to end concerned with the making of fiction” (69). He asserts that McEwan builds the story on a large number of intertextual references and allusions so that his novel could be productive of further meanings by building on the shoulders of other literary classics, and Briony “in her literary act of atonement […] has finally learned how to imagine herself into the feelings of others” (82). Júlia Neves Chálabi (2013) illustrates “how literature is portrayed in Atonement, what role it exerts, and how it relates to and affects the main characters” (2) and claims that Briony’s development as a writer and grown-up is intertwined and integrated with literature and literary composition. Alistair Cormack (2009) maintains that McEwan’s Atonement, with its pointed reference to Jane Austen and other English literary works, inherits “the Great Tradition” enunciated by F. R. Leavis by its prominent concern with life and moral. “[I]t is this tradition to which Atonement refers by its many implicit quotations” (72). However, Peter David Mathews (2017) refutes Cormack’s critique of Atonement as “a return to F. R. Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition,’” (11) and criticizes traditional belief in an inalienable connection between literature and morality. Instead, he contends that Atonement chases the emergence of the novel genre to the creation of modern subjectivity.

Then if there is no direct relationship between literature and morality, what is literature for in this troubled times, “a destitute time” (89), as is pronounced by Heidegger in a lecture delivered in 1946, “What are Poets for?”. “Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute time because it becomes ever more destitute” (89). The gods have died, and there is no more absolute authority that is beyond challenge. It is also what W. B. Yeats laments about in his poem “The Second Coming” (1919). “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity” (124). A new era of godlessness and materialism that is filled with doubt and uncertainty looms over the head. Heidegger, therefore, avers that “Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. […] To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy” (92). Although in the Republic Plato claims that “all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of truth but merely produce a superficial likeness of any subject they treat, including human excellence” (342) and accuses the poets of corrupting the public mind, Heidegger asserts that poets reach into the darkness that envelops people to search for something worthy and dependable for us in a godless and alienated society. In the wake of this line of thought, McEwan puts forward the question of “what is literature for” in the first part and gives his answer to this question in the following parts of Atonement.

1. “What is Literature for?”
2. Hillis Miller opens his book On Literature (2002) with, “[t]he end of literature is at hand. Literature’s time is almost up. It is about, that is, the different epochs of different media. Literature, despite its approaching end, is nevertheless perennial and universal. It will survive all historical and technological changes” (1). This is an echo to the on-going debate on whether literature had come to an end or, despite the crisis, it will overcome every challenge to remain as the jewel in the crown of human culture. Beyond all doubt, literature is on the decline in this technological and digital world and “has lost its pre-eminence as the most profound way of disseminating ideas and creating values” (Annan 10). People are motivated by the acquisition of material wealth and give little, if not any, thought to the “useless” literature, which seriously calls into question whether literature, and more generally humanities, has become redundant in this pragmatic and materialistic world. Like Paul Marshall in Atonement, who commits the crime of rape without being held to account, who is hell-bent on making profits by selling fake chocolate bars to the government during the World War II, and who does not give a tinker’s damn about literature, later enjoys tremendous financial success and also is ennobled as Lord Marshall. McEwan’s novel spins around Marshall’s crime, for which Robbie is wrongly convicted, and the blossoming love between Cecilia and Robbie is doomed from the start, and on account of which Briony has been atoning for her sin of lying for fifty-nine years with her novel.

Atonement is divided into three parts, followed by an epilogue. Setting the first part of the story in the sultry summer days of 1935, McEwan weaves the threads of literature into a story of a crime committed by thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis against Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner. The upper-middle-class Tallis family lives in an exquisite estate in the English countryside, and there is also Robbie, the cleaning lady’s son, and the family’s protégé. The middle child Cecilia, as well as Robbie, is fresh out of Cambridge, where they studied literature. The youngest Briony, obsessed with writing stories, has composed a play, The Trials of Arabella, to be performed in honor of her homecoming brother, the eldest Tallis child Leon as well as his friend Paul Marshall.

The novel’s protagonist, Briony comes to the ending verge of the dreamlike childhood of fairytale and unsophistication, and is both dazzled and confounded by the unpredictability and complexity of the real world of adulthood, which echoes the childhood experience of Tom and Maggie Tulliver described by George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss (1860). “They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them” (191). Moving gradually away from self-absorption, Briony is obsessed with tidiness and orderliness and feels hugely overwhelmed with the complexity and disorder of life.

She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so. Whereas her big sister’s room was a stew of unclosed books, unfolded clothes, unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, Briony’s was a shrine to her controlling demon: the model farm spread across a deep window ledge consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way—toward their owner—as if about to break into song, and even the farmyard hens were neatly corralled. (4-5)

Wrapped up in the world of imagination and creativity, Briony tries to retain order and fashion chaos into orderliness in her fictional story. By fabricating stories, Briony can create an orderly world in it as she likes and intersperses it with secrets waiting to be discovered by her readers. “There must be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection” (108). In her stories, the poetic justice is near at hand, nothing runs out of control, and everything is regulated and modulated by an authoritative presence.

The golden lining around her fairy stories, folktales, and plays is gradually darkened. “The self-contained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away” (34). Besides, The Trials of Arabella, the play she wrote to perform in honor of her visiting brother and his friend, is given up because her three cousins do not act out what she has created. It comes to her mind that a play cannot be totally under her control owing to its performance, but she can create a fully controlled novel, a well-crafted and mature novel. “Pen in hand, she stared across the room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of childhood she considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up” (109). Realizing the world she is living in is not as simple as she has imagined, she decides to write a real story based on her acute observation and understanding.

One day, when Briony comes to a second-floor window and looks out into the unambiguous sunlight, she sees her sister Cecilia and Robbie. Their tussle and quarrel and Cecilia’s jumping in the fountain in her underwear intrigue her intense curiosity. She reads into this soundless scene what fits her preconception, and holds on to the pursuit of the clues that can feed on her impulsive fantasy so that her first story of the real world could be completed. “This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent” (37). Briony attentively and intentionally, if not maliciously, collects the “messages” she detects from the people and makes the pieces together to bring about the integration of her story. Later, the word “cunt” Briony reads from Robbie’s letter to Cecilia and the sex scene in the library where she walks in on the couple, sufficiently convinces her that Robbie is a “sex maniac,” who preys on young women. She unjustly accuses innocent and unknowing Robbie of raping her cousin Lola Quincey, leading to the actual rapist Paul Marshall, an opportunist and war-profiteer, getting away with his crime; the newly-in-love couple being separated because of Robbie’s wrongful imprisonment; and no one except Cecilia and Robbie’s mother believing in his indignant protestations of innocence. Eventually, Briony inserts the final piece into the puzzle to complete the plot of her first novel.

Briony’s self-absorbed literary musings and self-centered worldview not only shuts herself away from what is happening around her, but also comes in line with the Tallises’s unthinking bias against lower-class Robbie, which reminds Harold Bloom’s assertion in How to Read and Why (2000) to claim that, “I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good” (22). Literature is not a panacea for improving a deteriorating situation, and neither can it be a substitute for a higher form that can mete out justice and weed out evil.

Besides Briony’s fascination with literature, both Cecilia and Robbie have studied literature at Cambridge. Before the fountain episode, there is an exchange between Cecilia and Robbie over the respective merits of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. This argument leads straight to F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), in which Leavis contends that the great English novelists “are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity” (18). He sees literature as a means of ethical instruction and enlightenment to improve a person. However, Robbie disagrees with Leavis’s opinion and suggests that literature has a peripheral role in the early twentieth century’s tumultuous social climate. “Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures” (86). Under the looming threat of World War II, the alleged bond between literature and morality seems utterly ruptured, and literature is reduced to the status of dispensable appendages.

Neither does literature fill the spiritual emptiness in a godless universe, nor bring order to the modern world of materialism and skepticism, nor fill the moral vacuum and temper the materialism. The question, “what is literature for?”, which is raised by McEwan in the first part, is yet to be answered in the remaining parts of the novel. In the introduction to Literary Theory: An Introduction, titled “What is Literature?” Eagleton claims that literature is based on social constructions, ideologies, and value-judgments. “We can drop once and for all the illusion that the category ‘literature’ is ‘objective’, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature” (9). Understandably, the definition of literature is difficult and controversial, but in McEwan’s Atonement, literature closely associates with the mirror that reflects the deep inner self, which is silenced and obscured by the unsurmountable difficulties.

• Mirror of Inner Self

In The Red and the Black (1830), Stendhal describes the novel as a “mirror” held up to reality to reflect life as it is. “You see, sir, a novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quagmires on the road” (371). A novel, according to Stendhal, constitutes the full expression of human conditions and social processes. It is literature as the umbrella term for poetry, drama, and novel that mirrors society and reflects the flaws of the social system and misdeeds of social members. Mark William Roche asserts in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004) that “[t]his traditional image of art as specular carries with it a twofold idea: first, that we see ourselves more clearly through literature, as we identify with the players in the work; and second, that we draw existentially on this reception as an experience of self-knowledge, overcoming weaknesses in ourselves” (211). Literature is more than a mirror that reflects the external life, but a mirror that reveals and recalls the inner self that has been laid dormant within. In Atonement, both the poems quoted by Cecilia to encourage Robbie to cling to his desire to come home and young Briony’s literary journey in the hope of atonement are the answer given to the question, “what is literature for.”

Part two of the novel is about Robbie, who joins the army to fight in World War II in exchange for his early release from prison. Robbie and the other two privates are traversing across the countryside in France to get to the coast in Dunkirk to be evacuated back to Britain. With a piece of shrapnel still embedded in his stomach, he struggles to survive the war only for the hope of being reunited with the still-waiting Cecilia. Walking for several days to join the Allied soldiers’ evacuation, Robbie is reminded of “[a] dead civilization. First, his own life ruined, then everybody else’s” (204). With ruined lives and ruined families, no happiness can be restored, no damage can be undone, and no crime can be forgiven. Hope is dwindling, and the spirit is darkening. Besides, his wound is festering, and the fever is worsening, but he cannot stop for fear that he will never go back. Cecilia’s letter to him is in his top pocket, sustaining him through everything he comes across. In the letter, Cecilia quotes W. H. Auden’s 1939 poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” to encourage him to tighten his grip on life no matter what he has to face on his way back to her. “In the nightmare of the dark, / All the dogs of Europe bark” (190) “In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start” (228). The lines haunt his mind again and again, evoking sweet feelings of hope and joy among the debris of destruction and chaos. Finally, his wound reduces him to be feeble and lethargic, and the rampant violence and brutal death that he helplessly testified cause him to almost succumb to the struggle against “the coarsening and general numbness” (247). Robbie feels that the scale of the damage and the disaster’s depth are too grievous to be atoned for so that he has to surrender to both his wound and the unbearable reality. As he is slowly loosening the grip on hope in his fading awareness, he remembers what Cecilia quoted to him by the open police car door on that summer night, when he was detained for alleged rape and when almost everyone turns his back on him by accepting Briony’s accusation of rape against him as true. The lines “Oh, when I was in love with you, / Then I was clean and brave” (247), from A. E. Housman’s pastoral elegies, A Shropshire Lad (1896), come up in his mind, and he resolves never to leave the dead unburied and never let the sins unexpiated.

The third part is set in 1940 in a London hospital and told from the perspective of eighteen-year-old Briony who, volunteers to become a nurse in training. Regarding her distortion of the truth five years ago, she realizes the tragic consequence that her childish assumptions and lies have brought about to the couple’s lives, and “she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable” (269). Nevertheless, she attempts to amend for the past with both her real story and her repentance. Briony’s first novella, Two Figures by a Fountain, is commended but rejected by Horizon periodical editor. It is her first attempt to reveal what happened on that day through three different perspectives of Cecilia, Robbie, and her own. But as the editor in the feedback criticizes it to Briony, so much information and processes are tucked away under the narrative technique of stream of consciousness so that the core of the story, that is, “the backbone” is missing. “Your most sophisticated readers might be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I’m sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens” (296). Briony’s story lacks the central theme to unite the discursive and rambling ideas, images, and fragments to confess what had happened and what a horrible crime she had committed in the past. She attempts to hold up the mirror to her inner struggle of guilt, but she is not ready to face squarely up to the irreparable damage that she has caused.

1. H. Abrams contends in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) that, “[t]he work ceases then to be regarded as primarily a reflection of nature, actual or improved; the mirror held up to nature becomes transparent and yields the reader insights into the mind and heart of the poet himself” (23). Briony, though she has determined to make a clean breast of her past misdoings, is evasive of what happened on that sultry summer day because the damage she has caused is too extensive to be pieced up. McEwan shows what is going on in her mind, the contents of her consciousness, the fierce fight between necessity and reluctance, conscience and heart, while Briony is on her way to meet Robbie and Cecilia to confess her guilt.

Did she think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three streams!—of consciousness? The evasions of her little novel were precisely those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella—and was necessary to it. What was she to do now? It was not the backbone of a story that she lacked. It was backbone. (302)

This evasion endlessly gnaws at her conscience so that she needs to set herself free from the qualms and scruples with a head-on attitude. On her way to meet Robbie and Cecilia, Briony drops in on the wedding ceremony between Lola and Paul Marshall, a chocolate magnate, as an uninvited guest. With the ceremony going on and the words from the Book of Common Prayer being intoned, Briony understands how it gets difficult to reverse her testimony to proclaim Robbie’s innocence. “[T]he truth that only Marshall and his bride knew at first hand was steadily being walled up within the mausoleum of their marriage. There it would lie secure in the darkness, long after anyone who cared was dead. Every word in the ceremony was another brick in place” (307). The married couple will never speak out what happened on that summer night, and Briony’s lonely confession will be confronted with a great feeling of suspicion and distrust. However, she goes on her way to meet two persons who resent and hate her most. As is expected, the meeting turns out to be awkward and discomforting, and Briony is not forgiven. But she promises to publicly right her wrongs. “She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin” (330). Briony will restart her storytelling to mirror what is in her mind truthfully.

Arthur Krystal contends in This Thing We Call Literature (2016) that, “[w]e want important writing […] to explore the human condition, and we want our writers to function, as Eliot said of the metaphysical poets, as ‘curious explorers of the soul.’ […] So while lesser writers may summon enthusiasm or indifference, great writers power their way into our consciousness almost against our will.” (12-13). Literature is by no means merely dramatic narrative or creative writing, but it explores the inner workings of the human mind that almost nothing else can come close to. As is asserted by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon (1994), “The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves” (31). This is what McEwan strives to illustrate concerning literature, the writing holding up a real mirror to the inner self. Also, there is a short coda to come to give a finishing touch to the question, “what is literature for?”

1. Lamp of Empathy

In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), which is also invoked by McEwan in his next novel Saturday (2005), the spiritual crisis and moral distress are given full voice by the sad sound of the ebbing tide. “The Sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;/ But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world” (87). The unifying faith that binds human beings together in a network of supportive relationships is dying away, and a bleak future of distrust and indifference is closing in. Perhaps in this century of faithlessness and self-centeredness, literature might not become a replacement for religion “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” (161), as is announced in “The Study of Poetry” by Arnold, while in McEwan’s novel it functions as a lamp to illuminate understanding and to illustrate empathy. According to Suzanne Keen, empathy is “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect,” and it can be evoked “by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (208). That is to say, by witnessing, hearing, and reading, the shared feelings and experiences might be developed among human beings. And McEwan drives this point home in the closing coda of Atonement.

The ending opens with Briony’s seventy-seventh birthday party in 1999 in London. She comes to the old Tallis House, renovated into a hotel called Tilney’s, whose name points right back to the novel’s epigraph taken from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). In Austen’s novel, Tilney’s house is called Northanger abbey. Seventeen-year-old Catherine, inexperienced and unsophisticated, is criticized by Henry Tilney for making good-humored mistakes through projecting what happened in the Gothic novels into her own life. After that, Catherine realizes how harmful and dangerous indulgence in fantasy can be and accepts his criticism. On the other hand, in Atonement, like Catherine, Briony also confuses real life with her willful fantasies and childish assumptions. However, unlike Catherine, Briony is not stopped in her imaginative folly, but let alone or tolerantly indulges in making the irreversible mistake and commits the crims beyond the possibility of forgiveness.

At this point, it is revealed that both Robbie and Cecilia died in 1940 before Briony could confess her guilt to them, and the three parts before the coda are her eighth and final draft of Robbie and Cecilia’s story, which will probably never be published before her death for the legal aspects of the narrative involving the Marshalls who are still alive and prosperous.

My fifty-nine-year assignment is over. There was our crime—Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine—and from the second version onward, I set out to describe it. I’ve regarded it as my duty to disguise nothing—the names, the places, the exact circumstances—I put it all there as a matter of historical record. But as a matter of legal reality, so various editors have told me over the years, my forensic memoir could never be published while my fellow criminals were alive. You may only libel yourself and the dead. Since the late forties, the Marshalls have been active about the courts, defending their good names with the most expensive ferocity. (349)

From the second draft of the story, Briony tries to open herself up with no reservations to the readers. Her empathetic identification with the couple she inadvertently has separated and her punitive atonement for what has done is achieved in her novel.

She holds high up a lamp to shed light on her desperate journey of atonement and illuminate the minds of readers to keep the light of hope burning within. However, only in this final draft does she give the hapless couple a chance to expect a better future when they stand side-by-side to watch Briony’s slowly distancing back who has confessed her guilt and promised to reverse her testimony. In the previous drafts, she has been pitiless and unrelenting to herself, and only in this final draft does she give herself a chance to turn her back to the couple with light steps and unburdened heart. With eight drafts and her life-long confession, Briony makes her way into the atonement as the author of her story.

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, be reconciled with, or forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination, she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (350-51)

The attempt to remember, ask for forgiveness, and rest in peace with a clear conscience is what Briony has been in pursuit of with the help of literature. If the reunion and making amends are impossible in the world of “God,” why not make it possible at the very least in a novel where the novelist is the almighty, and which will be read and remembered hereafter.

This is a story of Briony’s confession and atonement and her pitiless self-accusation by way of her continuous repentance on what she did when she was thirteen and her agonizing imagination of what would happen to the couple who are split apart by her shameless lies in eight drafts of Robbie and Cecilia’s story up till when she is eventually diagnosed with dementia. What has happened cannot be reversed, but what is important is the effort to atone for the wrongdoings, and in Atonement Briony’s novel is the only way she can atone for the terrible ordeals she had caused, the only way she can come to peace with herself, and also the lamp that shines out to illuminate her journey of reconciliation with herself.

I like to think that it isn’t a weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration … Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trails of Arabella? It’s not impossible. But now I must sleep. (351)

Briony’s atonement is not yet achieved by the happy ending of the lovers in the final draft. Still, McEwan makes her tenacious attempt to atone for her crime possible with the completed novel and makes her finish and sleep in peace at the end of the book.

McEwan claims in his article, “Literature, Science, and Human Nature,” “[t]hat which binds us, our common nature, is what literature has always, knowingly and helplessly, given voice to” (19). The efficacy of novelistic invitations to sympathy has always been doubted and frequently denied, but a novelist’s ability to move the feelings, and even appeal the convictions is indisputable. McEwan further contends that “Literature flourishes along the channels of this unspoken agreement between writers and readers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific and the general. At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific” (6). Throughout human history, human minds interact with one another in a dialogue by conceiving, interpreting, and comprehending the universal themes in literature to lay out this mental map. In Atonement, McEwan spreads out a story of the star-crossed lovers and truly redemptive girl and then comes around to make it a map of Briony’s atonement, which turns out to be a metafictional reflection on literature itself. Literature, as a universal language of the world, is not only a mirror of the inner self to eke out hope despite all the adversities, but also a lamp of empathy to enlighten and empower people to take “a stand against oblivion and despair” (351).

1. Conclusion

Before the fateful day of Robbie’s false accusation, having earned a first in literature from Cambridge, he plans to pursue a medical degree. He thinks to himself that “he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall—this is the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too” (87). Robbie envisages his life in the future, in 1962, when he will be fifty years old. The level of understanding, compassion, and empathy he has achieved through literature must make him a better doctor to gauge his patients’ emotional state by curing both mind and body. Literature, as the mirror of the inner self and the lamp of empathy, reflects the inner workings of the human mind and illuminates the empathetic understanding of human existence.

Though based on fancy and imagination, literature is more essentially dependent on the ability to combine the images, occasions, and thoughts to create a sphere of the sensor so that all the elements can be fused into a single crystal structure. Moreover, the sharpening conflict between different nations and regions, and the deepening crisis caused by the widening gap between the rich and the poor make it all the more need for understanding and self-understanding. In that sense, literature as a highly positive and enlightening force connects us with its rich language and empathy-evoking content. It brings us closer to understanding each other and our shared humanity in a modern world where the binding power of religion or any other authority either fragment into sectarian schism or slides into skepticism or materialism. In Atonement, as a hugely ambitious work, the theme of guilt and atonement is indissolubly linked to what literature is for and comes up with its answers.

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