Atonement

Having finally finished Atonement, I can say that I am very impressed with McEwan’s ability to tell a story. I was left shocked and satisfied because though the story does not end with a “happily ever after” tone, it does complete itself. I was perplexed because I felt certain ways about the entire situation before I knew the real truth, and the ending caused me to challenge my initial thoughts.

After finishing Part 3, I was interested by my own lack of sympathy for Cecelia and Robbie in the last few scenes. For some reason I find it too hard to place all of the blame on Briony. The circumstances were too influential to make this only her crime. It wasn’t her fault that she was only a young naive girl, Robbie and Cecelia could have picked a more appropriate time and place to have sex, Emily could have been a more attentive parent… the blame is endless. The last interaction seems to justify Cecelia and Robbie’s anger, though I just cannot agree that Cecelia and Robbie are complete victims. I ended the chapter feeling sorry for Briony and fed up with Cecelia and Robbie.

Though, I am not sure where to place my own thoughts knowing that the emotions shown are all through the lens of Briony. All of the anger held by Cecelia and Robbie are merely perceived by Briony who has a guilty conscious, and she is also assuming this is how they felt because she never did get to meet with them. I was left asking, what would their accurate emotions have been? Would Cecelia have been more understanding if Briony had really met her?

Finally, was McEwan planning on adding the last chapter from the beginning, or does Brinoy in the sense of her being an author, reflect McEwan’s own inability to perfect his story? I feel that he might have written the last chapter on a whim after the story was complete, or at the very least used Briony’s frustrations as a storyteller as a method of expressing his own challenges creating the story.

Atonement: Many questions, few answers

Atonement feels, very appropriately, like a culmination of all the ideas and puzzles contained in the previous books we have read, from Northanger Abbey, to Cloud Atlas, to Tristram Shandy, to Frankenstein, and Pale Fire. Like Catherine Moreland, its heroine has a severely wrong-headed perception of the how the world works. Like Cloud Atlas, each of its four parts has its own flavor, whether it is the romanticist feel of part one or the historical war fiction of part two. Like Frankenstein's story-within-a-story style, Atonement's events occur through various sources, such as the letters between Cecilia and Robbie and Nettle's account. Finally, like Tristram Shandy and Pale Fire, the narrator of the novel toys with our trust by reaching into the story and manipulating events to suit her personal agenda. All of these ideas are contained within the veneer of a linear, conventionally told narrative that makes Atonement a surprisingly digestible and emotional read like Frankenstein, but with the literary intricacies of Pale Fire.

Something that turned my mind inside out is the fact that Briony chooses to reveal at the end that the reunion between Robbie and Cecelia was made up. She claims to have done this for two particular reasons: firstly, had she written the novel with complete accuracy, its readers would be disappointed that Rob and Cee's story ended on such a grim note, after the avoidable and crushing event that takes place at the end of part one. Secondly, she wishes to atone for her crime by using her talents to unite the two in fiction. The thing is, Briony's shocking revelation is part of the overall narrative of Atonement. It is not some sort of afterword by the author; that would only be the case if this novel was non fiction. But Atonement is a fictional story, and because of that part four is an integral piece of the narrative that completely changes the entire nature of the story.

Now we have to start asking ourselves, just how accurate exactly is the story of Atonement? Briony claims to not just have had many, many versions of the story over the course of several decades, but to also be suffering from vascular dementia, a disease that wreaks havoc on one's mind. When we look within the story that Briony tells, we see how her youthfully warped sense of reality has an effect on those that would listen to her. When we look outside the story Briony tells and into the larger frame of the fourth part, we pick up on small clues that she drops, namely her mental illness and her having written many versions, and realize that for all we know, as we read Atonement we are in a very similar situation that the police, Emily Tallis, Lola and so on were put in when Briony falsely accused Robbie of rape. Of course, the consequences are nowhere as dire; this is a work of fiction after all. But it does point out the unbelievable power the author has over its readers. The author can grant readers a sense of comfort in knowing that they are reading a reliable narrative, or it can take away that comfort and stamp its identity all over the story, as is the case in Pale Fire. Most pertinently, however, it can reach beyond the page and manipulate the reader's perceptions of reality. Just look at some of the high profile criminal cases, such as OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony, or even the Iraq War, which was driven by politicians and their supporters who bought into the narrative of Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMDs.

If there is one very important message to be taken away from the works we have read, it is to be wary of the presence of the author, whether it is a non fiction writer, a literary critic, or a journalist.

The Dichotomy Between Adolescence and Adulthood

In reading through the first section of Atonement, I was struck by the dichotomy between adolescence and adulthood.  It seems as though all the characters are fumbling somewhere in the middle of childhood and actually growing up.  It appears as though several of the main characters are all dealing with childhood but in several different ways. 

First there are the twins, Jackson and Pierrot who are obviously children.  Their concerns are playing and eating and not being punished for wetting the bed or coming down to dinner without socks.  Because they don’t understand what is going on with their parents, they are blaming Lola for their situation and decide to run away.

Lola herself is also dealing with that precarious balance between being a child and a woman.  At fifteen years old, she is highly concerned with her appearance and making herself look older and more mature (which, of course, is to her detriment).  Although only a young teen, she is tasked with the responsibility of playing the role of mother to the twins but readily accepts the lead role in Briony’s play. 

Obviously the clearest example of the dichotomy between an adult and a child is seen in the character Briony because she is, of course, is teetering on the brink of adulthood herself.  I thought it was interesting that Robbie himself, who also seems to be stuck in a form of adolescence, imagined at the dinner table how Briony was unreadable and prone to swing between maturity and childishness.  Even Emily, Briony’s mother mused on how things will be when Briony was fully grown.  However, what Emily doesn’t understand at the time is that in one evening, Briony matures from a little girl to a young lady.  She abandons her play, seeing the juvenile nature of her writing and tears down her poster.  However, in her pouting, she comes across Robbie and accepts the letter meant for Cecilia.  Because of her youth, she reads the letter and discovers the word which changes everything.  She is still too immature to see that Robbie was not attacking Cecilia in the library and decided with her underdeveloped mind that it is now her adult task to protect Cecilia.  Because of her lack of maturity and understanding the one word from Robbie’s letter becomes the foundation of her evidence against him and leads her to make a terrible accusation. 

Then there are the three young adults of the story who are all suffering from a debilitating case of refusing to grow up.  Leon seems like a classic example of a young man, given all the advantages of a wealthy family, who refuses to take the leg up his father offers him in order to continue to play and enjoy life.  It seems that Leon is responsible enough to eventually cede to his father but for the moment he seems to be more interested in hanging out with his rich friends.  Cecilia is also stuck in a rut because she is finished with school but refuses to move on from her family home, fearing she would miss out on something.  Perhaps she felt it was her responsibility to take the mother role over Briony or perhaps she couldn’t leave, secretly being in love with Robbie but that so far is only speculation.  Finally, there is Robbie who seems like the guy we all know.  He is smart and has the aptitude to do anything he sets his mind to but he can’t seem to find a way to finish anything.  He seems to flounder with how his life is meant to be and can’t ever make the decision.  I the meantime, Robbie just remains at the house, handling the landscaping and wasting his mind. 

 I think it will be interesting to see how the characters mature, if at all, as the story progresses.

Pale Fire: Fantastic Story, Strange Metafiction, or Ravings of a Madman?

Pale Fire has many similar elements from Tristram Shandy, but takes these elements to a whole new level of mind-numbing. As discussed in class, there is virtually an infinite number of ways to approach this work, which plays very conveniently into the critical essays from Falling Into Theory. No one person's path through Pale Fire has more credence than another person's, and each path reveals something different about the work, like using different types of light to bring out different qualities of an object. In my case, I for the most part read Pale Fire linearly, though as Kinbote's rantings wore on into the fourth Canto, I tried reading it backwards to see if it would make a difference. It did not.

At any rate, Pale Fire, at least in a single reading, seems best absorbed with the same awareness as Tristram Shandy. One must not fall into the trap of becoming a reader within the world of Pale Fire, but must instead act as a reader within the real world, the world of Vladimir Nabokov and not Charles Kinbote. From the perspective of a reader within Pale Fire, the entire work is a crudely Frankensteined being: two different creatures, one an eloquent poem, the other an obscenely bloated commentary, surgically attached to one another at the hip.

As Jennifer mentioned in her post, the actual poem of Pale Fire is a remarkable work itself, with plenty of depth and revelations that are uncovered with each reading. The problems begin when we move into Kinbote's commentary. The commentary sometimes does give behind the scenes insight and opinion on various lines of the poem, but for the most part one can go through all 230-something pages of it without having to read the poem at all. Kinbote goes into excruciating detail in his many anecdotes about the King of Zembla, his conversations with John Shade, and the assassin Gradus who bumbles his way into accidentally killing Shade. These have very little, if any, relevance or importance to the poem itself. Had I read this as someone within the world of Pale Fire, this work would have been a terrible constructed read, because that is exactly what it is within the world of Pale Fire. Charles Kinbote has taken Shade's poem and tried to claim it for his own, adding 230 pages of meaningless commentary to a poem that he himself has made all kinds of alterations to. Many times throughout the commentary we discover that Kinbote has dramatically altered various lines of the poem, which makes me ask, if the Pale Fire we read is not truly John Shade's work, is it still a great work? The answer is yes, but only if you read it as a reader in the world of Nabokov, aka the real world.

As a more detached reader, you go from asking questions like "Why is Kinbote such an arrogant jerk? What is the deal with the commentary?" to questions like "Who is really narrating the story? The King of Zembla or a madman who thinks he is the King?" You perceive Pale Fire not as a well written poem with an overblown commentary attached to it, but as a puzzle box. The kind of box you must think outside of.