The redemption of literature: the making of fiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement

Abstract

Atonement, by British author Ian McEwan, was published in 2001 and has as protagonist Briony Tallis, a talented girl who is a writer-to-be and who lives among the fantasies of her creative mind. While in the verge of adolescence she makes a serious mistake that affects the lives of those around her. Briony finds in literature a way of recreating the world and retelling the story she could not change. Because Atonement is a metafictional work, literature, literary composition, and the writing processes utilized by Briony and by McEwan are major interests of this thesis. The results show that Atonement presents, partially, a fragmented narrative, and its metafictional basis is developed under an untraditional realism, enabling significant shifts in the story and forcing the reader to resignify the categories of meaning and interpretation built throughout the reading. The novel-within-a-novel format makes Atonement peculiar to scrutinize in the sense that the limits between Brionys composition and McEwans become blurred. Atonement has literature as a theme and as a structuring element, creating main characters that not only are avid readers, literary enthusiasts, and scholars, but who have their relations mediated and constructed by/through literature. Furthermore, in the metafictional process triggered, the characters, already fictional devices, are fictionalized, and Briony, as being one of the authors, goes through self-fictionalization. It can be concluded that in the many fictional levels found in Atonement the novel presents itself as a postmodern piece, both thematically and structurally, and it promotes a dialogue with the British literary tradition. These intertextualities evoke different ways of looking at literature and at ways of making it in contemporaneity. In a postmodern moment when we seem to have overcome the fear of the exhaustion of literature, Atonement comes not to prove literature has indeed survived, but to ask what can be made out of the vast trajectory tradition has left us