Revision Cards - Atonement: A Level, Themes

As is evident from the novel’s title, atonement and regret are the chief concerns of the text, and of its narrator, Briony.
Many characters exhibit regret and a sense of guilt – Lola and Paul Marshall, both at least as guilty as Briony, do not.
Cecilia does not exhibit regret as she is comfortable that she has done the right thing; Robbie deals well with regret.
The sincerity of Briony’s regret is potentially undermined by the fact that outside of her fiction she never actually sought or apologised to Cecilia.

Themes

Atonement: A Level

War is crucial to the novel, overshadowing even Part One, despite its being set in a country house in 1935. For example in Jack Tallis’s war department’s calculations for predicted casualties.
Very different attitudes to conflict are exhibited in the novel, from Robbie’s disillusioned stoicism, Emily Tallis’s indifference, and Paul Marshall seeing it as a business opportunity.
The most important conflicts within the narrative are arguably internal ones, the central example of which is Briony’s struggle with guilt and need to atone.
Atonement’s attitude to the Second World War is anything but idealised, being primarily filtered through Robbie’s horrific experiences.

Themes

Atonement: A Level

Atonement is a tragedy, but also a romance, with the former only coming to light in the late revelation that Briony’s narrative is idealised invention.
Love is a powerful, ‘elemental’ (p. 264) force in Atonement: it sustains Robbie through prison and the war, and allows Cecilia to forsake her own family.
Love is present in many forms in the novel: the romantic sexual love of Cecilia and Robbie, the lust of Paul Marshall, and the ‘self-love’ (p. 147) of Briony.
Romance literature is key to the novel, from the lovers’ early remarks on Pamela, to the code used in their letters, and Briony’s enthusiasm for melodrama.

Themes

Atonement: A Level

The concept of truth is naturally at the centre of a novel in which the pivotal act involves the bearing of false witness.
The form of the text deliberately draws attention to the relative truth of the narrative, and closes with the rhetorical question – ‘But what really happened?’ (p. 371).
Briony’s fault as a child is an inability or disinclination to separate fact from fiction, taking her misinformed readings of events as simple truth.
In trying to make her false claim against Robbie a ‘perfectly honest’ one, Briony resorts to technicality and ‘common sense’ (p. 169).

Themes

Atonement: A Level

By using the device of a narrator who is also author, McEwan explores the power of authorship and the act of writing.
The tragic lovers Cecilia and Robbie are both more sophisticated readers than Briony, and more experienced in life, and Robbie is both an aspiring poet and a letter writer.
Literary allusions and works are evoked regularly, and the letter Cyril Connolly sends Briony in Part Two is an explicit discussion of writing as art.
The limitations of authorship – and thus the effectiveness of Briony’s method of atoning – is undermined by her acknowledgement of her narrative’s untruth and futility.

Themes

Atonement: A Level

A Level Study Notes and Revision Guides