Epilogue 'London, 1999' Flashcards
Important events
Briony writes the epilogue 59 years after she describes the events in part 2 and 3 and We learn about some important events that have happened in the intervening time.
We learn about Leon nursing his wife until her death and of the admirable way in which he raised his children afterwards.
Briony mentions her parents’ divorce and her father’s remarriage and reflects on Emily’s funeral over 25 years earlier.
We also learn of Briony’s husband, Thierry, who has also died.
The twins appear to have led happy family lives, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren mentioned.
‘I will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all…My phone number, my address, my name and what I did with my life will be gone.’ (354)
- a kind of poetic justice, or perhaps even divine retribution
- AO5: the ending feels almost too poetic: perhaps Briony has made this up too, perhaps she just died peacefully of old age, but wrote this to make her readers feel fulfilled in the knowledge that she had been fittingly punished? She deceived us for the whole book and lied about her encounter with Robbie and Cecilia, it’s not beyond her
- ‘my name’ - she’s come full-circle, during her nursing career she had no name either
- ‘what I did with my life’ - she won’t remember her crime, so she won’t feel guilty - perhaps her punishment is not really a punishment at all but a release from the incarceration of her own guilty mind?
‘Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way toward the truth.’ (359)
This is what we have been forced to do as a reader
- do we? Briony certainly didn’t in Part One, and this novel hasn’t really shown this attitude (‘If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book.’)
- AO5: perhaps the above quote shows that Briony’s spent a lifetime trying to discover her true feelings, but has discovered only that the human mind is too complex to be fitted neatly within given parameters
- ironic because the police in Part One did not crawl around in search of the truth, they took the word of an impressionable, naive thirteen-year-old girl
‘There was our crime - Lola’s, Marshall’s, mine…I’ve regarded it as my duty to disguise nothing - the names, the places, the exact circumstances’ (369)
- interesting that the crime is firstly ‘Lola’s, Marshall’s’ and then ‘mine’ - she feels the least complicit
- in Part One she calls it ‘her’ crime
- ‘duty’ - soldiers in the war saw it as their ‘duty’ to go and die for their country
- and she’s failed in her ‘duty’, she said it herself: ‘If I really cared so much about facts, I should have written a different kind of book.’
- the message here is confused: has she sought to be truthful to the letter, or is she twisting circumstances to fit her novel?
‘But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy…of my final draft, then my fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.’ (371)
STORIES AND LITERATURE
- once Briony loses her mind, the truth will no longer exist: the truth won’t even ‘die with her’, because the dementia will mean she can no longer recall it - therefore the truth is whatever Briony makes it
- lack of autonomy/voice for Robbie and Cecilia, I doubt this is the way they would like to be remembered. Perhaps they would like this to read more like a cautionary tale
- AO5: it’s metafiction, but it’s also still fiction: McEwan made this all up. He’s perhaps trying to to make the point that the truth is such too abstract and elusive a concept for humanity to aspire to, because the truth will always be compromised by different factors: social class (Paul Marshall), trauma (Lola), anger and resentment (Cecilia), guilt (Briony)
- a link to ‘The Trials of Arabella’ and how the play can be seen as a synecdoche for the whole story
‘I like to think that [its]…a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end’ (371)
STORIES AND LITERATURE
- this ending section has given us mixed feelings about Briony’s development as a character: has she changed or not? This quotation would suggest not
- ‘a stand against oblivion and despair’: she’s not interested in truth, she’s ultimately interested in reader satisfaction, and by not telling the truth she’s achieved the opposite of her purpose
- AO5: it could be argued that she hasn’t really done the task that Robbie and Cecilia (or rather, she) set herself in the final scene of Part Three
Briony portrays herself as a victim
‘I thought of those sad inmates of Bedlam who were once a source of general entertainment, and I reflected in a self-pitying way on how I was soon to join their ranks.’
- some readers might find it unbelievable that Briony is able to feel ‘self-pity’ after all the suffering she has inflicted on other people: perhaps age and time has numbed her feeling of responsibility, and she has returned in some ways to her original ways (she does mention how she thinks she’s come full circle)
- ‘join their ranks’ - semantic field of the military, parallels with Robbie. Perhaps this shows Briony’s atonement: she is doing the same thing as Robbie - ‘joining the ranks’, marching on to her judgement as he did to his suffering in France
- ‘source of general entertainment’ - she is writing a novel, something people read for pleasure: the alignment of this novel with the genre of tragedy, link with catharsis
‘Perhaps I was nothing more than a victim of modern diagnostics’ (355)
- Briony trying to evoke pity in her audience for herself
- from the perspective of crime elements, the use of the noun ‘victim’ is interesting: she does paint herself as a victim in this book, but not to the extent that others are (Lola, Robbie)
- perhaps age and time has numbed her feeling of responsibility - link to the idea of her feeling ‘self-pity’ above
“Let me not be mad.” (355)
- allusion to KL
“A convenient distortion, and the least of my offences against veracity.” (356)
As she recounts her travels across town that day, Briony reveals that, during the events described in Part 3 of the novel, she actually worked in 3 hospitals, not one, describing this as “the least of my offences against veracity” (p356), acknowledging that she has manipulated the truth in other, more significant, ways.
AO4: Acknowdgement of the crime against the reader
“publication equals litigation” (359)
“How could that constitute an ending?” (371)
Briony saves her big revelation until the final paragraphs. She tells us that Robbie died in Dunkirk and that Cecilia died in September that year when the Balham Underground station was bombed. Briony did not visit Cecilia. Briony justifies her changes to herself (and her readers), asking “How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?” (p371) but ironically the reader is left unsatisfied with this new revelation.
