Atonement critics Flashcards
Brian Finney
“she ruthlessly subordinates everything the world throws at her to her need to make it subverse to demands of her own world”
“the young Briony suffers from an inability to disentangle life from the literature that has shaped her life”
can’t differ reality from fiction
“Briony is the prime example of the way art shapes her life as much as she shapes that life into art”
her stories affect her as much as she affects her stories
“it is the writer in her that induces her to identify Robbie as Lola’s attacker”
Robbie is the culprit that makes logical sense with the evidence that she has (pre-judgment bias)
“Briony forgets her new insight and tells her lie which at the time is less a lie than a misconstruction of the adult world she has been observing with the predatory eye of an aspiring novelist”
Briony misunderstands the workings of the adult world when she makes her lie
James Wood
“A prim, yearning, intelligent child with a rage for order and a tendency to judge before comprehending”
Briony must control the story in front of her
“Briony is one of the novels achievements”
?
“A universal experience is evoked, and McEwan subtly makes the banal and childish dilemma- when do I control my fingers?- the spur to those larger frustrations of childhood, the questions of authority, agency, importance”
Is Briony old enough to make her statement, and should they trust her?
“determination to accuse Robbie is bound with her literary impulses. she needs to make a story out of it”
Briony needs everything to be a story, with motives, criminals and crimes
“Briony believes Robbie’s arrest is a further confirmation of his guilt and the beginning of his punishment”
“this is a fine example of how subtly McEwan follows the self serving theatrics of Briony’s mind”
Briony’s experiences with Robbie at the fountain before create/enforce her idea that Robbie is the culprit
Roland Barthes
Death of the author
“the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”
Author has no control over our interpretation of it, instead we write our own text
Means that we judge whether or not Briony achieves atonement
Huw Marsh
Readers need to reread the novel in order to fully comprehend the implications of Briony’s authorship and invention
if we reread we can see evidence of Robbie being guilty for the crime, and also evidence of Briony’s interpretation of events through her use of language
Martin Jacobi
The reader is induced into misreading with things such as Cecilia and Robbie’s deaths
Atonement teaches us about the dangers of misreading
Does our misreading of Robbie and Cecilia’s deaths mean we desire their deaths?
