Why Is Forgiveness Important In Ian Mcewan's Atonement?

Paul Boose once said “forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” The future altering accusation, which disrupts the pasts of many, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement is based on innocence and incapacity. Starting at a young age, Briony Tallis writes throughout her life to atone for the false accusation she made in the past, shaping her future negatively and dismally. Briony Tallis, McEwan’s misguided protagonist, highlights the lifetime search for forgiveness using repetition, altering social economic statuses, and various storytelling techniques.

When apologizing for a wrong doing, one often repeats words of sorrow and regret. Repetition, a commonly used technique in Atonement, begins with references to age. Thirteen year old Briony makes the accusation, old enough to know right from wrong. At thirteen, she has yet to come out to society and become a woman, so she spends her summer days with her younger cousins in the nursery, yet intrigued by adulthood. The hours preceding the formal dinner planned for the night of the accusation, “are charged with erotic tensions that the adolescent

characters still perceive in an indistinct way” (Thomsen). Showing that Briony’s nativity of adult love, her mother describes her as “baby and bathwater had vanished behind a locked door” (65). Upon seeing the scandalous letter Robbie had wrote to Cecilia, then seeing the two making love in the library, Briony is at first “jealous of the intimate relation that she perceives between Robbie and Cecilia…” (Thomsen). After developing the thoughts from her older cousin, she deduces that rape occurred. Later on in the night, when she finds the older cousin raped by a man in the woods, she accuses Robbie of doing it, because of her preconceived childish thoughts.
Emily and Jack Tallis through parental references show repetition throughout the book in addition to references about age. Formal and frigid conversations to and about Emily and Jack constitute the strained feeling of the family. Addressing their mother using her first name creates tension between the children and Emily, shown in Cecilia’s dialogue “Emily’s laying down” (45). The tension present, Emily states, occurs because “illness had stopped her giving her children all a mother should” (62-63). Constant amounts of stress Emily feels from her family characterizes the illness, shown in her headaches. Next, when describing their father, Leon and Cecelia refer to him more indirectly by never saying his name. Leon, who recently arrived home, shows this in "and the Old Man is staying in town?”(45). Jack Tallis creates the divide between he and his children due to his absence in their lives, compared to Emily’s omnipresence in their affairs. Issues created between the Tallis’ and their children that are shown early and progress throughout the book, then make the children’s abandonment of their family home more dire.
Robbie Turner grew up alongside the Tallis children because his mother worked for the family as the housekeeper. After Jack Tallis taking him in and providing everything he needed in life, he was considered to be a part of the family. Due to the Tallis influence in his life, he “becomes absorbed into the bourgeois mores of upper-middle-class life…” (Fraser). Being the son of their employed, the feeling of varied class level presents itself in various interactions. From Robbie’s point of view, “he had his politics to protect him, and his scientifically based theories of class…” meaning that through his knowledge and willpower, he kept up class boundaries to separate himself from the overrated upper class (74).
Cecilia, in addition, held her class boundaries with solemnity. With the certain issues, mostly Robbie, that she institutes class walls, she feels safe knowing she resides in the upper class. When the topic of Robbie going off to medical school, after being put through Cambridge for literature and taking up gardening, she thought the idea was “presumptuous too, since it was her father who would have to pay,” (18). She felt offended by the fact “he has spent his childhood moving freely between the bungalow and the main house,” (81). By making these barriers it took great strides for Robbie to eventually break them down, and for her to accept him, in order to connect in a new romantic way.
The battle for this romantic relationship was made hard by both Robbie and Cecilia's views about class, and the history they have . To achieve what they want in life, each other, they both must overcome these issues. During the realization of love and lust that they both feel, Robbie promotes and acknowledges them first and acts “as a catalyst for the rising of Cecilia’s class consciousness, which also makes her begin to question her own upper-middle-class background,” (Fraser). In addition to questioning her position, Cecilia finds “the class prejudice of her family that allows him to be sacrificed in this way, begins to fragment her class identity and make her more class-conscious of those below her in the class system” (Fraser). Having Robbie introduce her to a new perspective of life eventually made it easier for Cecilia to leave the family home and make a life for herself after the harsh realization that her family chose to believe her juvenile sister instead of the housekeeper’s son.
Readers are able to understand how characters like Cecilia, Robbie, and Briony feel throughout the book, especially at the time of the accusation because of the book’s writting. “Atonement does not feel, at first, like a book by McEwan,” readers feel this from alternating perspectives of McEwan’s characters to tell the story (Ascari). This style of writing allows McEwan to show readers all of the emotions and thoughts that his complex characters have. Varied perspectives, in addition, allow for situations in the book to be observed by the characters telling the story, “for it is through the eyes of different characters that we are shown the small events that take place in the Tallises’ country house…” (Thomsen). The changing vantage point of the same event, described multiple times, allows readers to attain a deeper understanding of how they unfold and how characters interpret them.
The use of alternating characters continues throughout the three parts of the book. In chapters one through fourteen, part one, the events are told by Briony, Cecilia, Robbie, and Emily. Alteration occurs when the second part of the book begins and flipping between character view points in chapters halts, making the point of view solely from Robbie. This effect makes readers question what events are going on in the other character’s lives and why Robbie is the only one speaking. Part three then fuses both parts one and two, because various characters describe the events, but the story no longer separates by a chapter basis. Here, readers learn about how the lives of Cecilia and Briony panned out, following the events of the summer night. Lastly, in the epilogue Briony writes solely from her point of view, the same way Robbie writes part two. When readers get to this point, one reader describes the book in parts as “the first part of the novel is the product of a juvenile phase of experimentation while the second and third are the expression of Briony’s maturity as an authoress, and the fourth is an example of journal writing” (Thomsen). Due to the separated parts commencing with Briony’s reflection of the entire story, readers are left to contemplate what they have just read.
From her reflection in her journal, readers discover what Briony has done to the story. “In the epilogue she admits to blatantly distorting facts in pars two and three…” her alterations then cause readers to feel dismayed and has them go back to reread what they thought was the truth (Pedot). One reader’s point of view states, “this revelation requires the reader to reevaluate everything she has read” (Quarrie). Some readers feel this way due to the connection they made in part one to Robbie and Cecilia, wanting them to succeed and end up happily in love. The want readers feel for the couple is continued in part two when learning about Robbie’s journey in the army, and in part three when they are shown happily together. Briony feels that through writing their happy ending, a way to seek forgiveness, which she describes in her journal. “Only now do we learn that to atone for the terrible crime of which she was guilty, she has kept writing and rewriting throughout her life a novel that tells those events” (Thomsen). This quote, and the tainted stories of the book, readers learn that Briony’s writing is the way she shows the thoughts in her mind.
Even in her early years, Briony writes stories, plays, and anything else to convey her thoughts and feelings. After she makes this accusation changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia, she starts writing for a purpose “this is the immense crime Briony will try to expiate throughout her life” (Thomsen). When readers figure out that facts are distorted in the earlier parts of the book, they realize that Briony tries to make the situation better for herself to live with through writing. By writing this story over time to atone for her wrongdoing “she confuses imagination and reality” (Messud). But, ultimately it is her conscious decision to rewrite the story with a happy ending, to better deal with what she did and never getting to actually ask for forgiveness.
Over the course of the book, Briony inputs her many attempts at the forgiveness she seeks.

After Cecilia left the family house in protest, Briony reached out to her in many letters of apology and the want to see her. From these attempts of reconciliation, Cecilia describes Briony in a letter to Robbie as, “beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it has meant” (199). Due to this information, located in the second part and later deemed as fiction, readers can conclude that this again is for Briony’s sake of seeking forgiveness instead of actually receiving it from Cecilia and Robbie. This, in addition, describes why readers characterize Briony by “she wrecked the life of Cecilia and Robbie, but she is also the one in whose hearts they still live” (Thomsen). Meaning that by writing for forgiveness for many years, she has kept the couple

alive.
By spending her life searching for forgiveness, Briony Tallis in Atonement showcases the many ways she tried to attain it. First using repetition created points to stand out to readers such as the importance of the age Briony had and the importance she placed on her parents distant relationship with her siblings and her. Then she showed the contrast of class she felt as important to the accusation. Lastly she switches how she tells the story of her wrongdoing in order to get readers to empathize for Robbie and Cecilia, but also herself. In conclusion, Briony does not achieve forgiveness for the accusation she made because she continues hold the events in her heart and has to conjure the happy ending she wanted.