“I put everything there for historical purposes… We will all only exist as my inventions. No one will care about the events and individuals that have been misinterpreted to make a novel... How can a novelist achieve atonement when... she is also God? In her imagination, she set the limits and the terms” (Atonement 2001 p. 369-371). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay A reader's interpretation of prose is fundamentally influenced by the perception of the narrator; therefore, an unreliable narrator has literary, theoretical, and moral consequences for the meanings that can be read into a text. Swapping an omniscient third-person narrator, who provides a seemingly complete and truthful account and encourages a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, for a focused, subjective perspective, visibly informed by ideologies and ethics, throws a shadow of doubt and ambiguity over the story. In the coda of Ian McEwan's Atonement, the manipulative narrator, Briony Tallis, emphasizes that this novel is her last chance to provide "satisfaction or reparation for [the] wrong [and] harm" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2015) that she caused to Cecilia, her sister and her lover, Robbie Turner, by misinterpreting their interactions and motivations. His reaction was, with catastrophic results, based on Victorian class consciousness and the horror of sexuality, and self-centeredly subordinated the reality of others to his fiction. The section "London, 1999" reveals Briony's failure to achieve the main meaning of the novel in its theological sense, but also depicts the maturation of her literary imagination, which allows her to atone through empathy. Yet the postmodern techniques imbued in this prose fiction suggest that it was still about the nature and process of storytelling. McEwan's adult work is characterized by a "private and psychological component" linked to a "public and historical component" (Finney 2004 p.68) which establishes the characters in Atonement as ideological products of their twentieth-century British context. century. Briony's direct voice amounts to the coda, thus calling into question her moral fulfillment of the main meaning of the novel, in its theological sense and through her imagination. Her character is steeped in her parents' late Victorian Puritan beliefs and her reading of Gothic literature. Briony's first play, a Gothic fairy tale, ends with "a good marriage"—"an unacknowledged representation of the yet unthinkable—sexual happiness" (9)—to which her mother, whose "deception of her own husband was a form of homage to the [strategic] importance of their marriage” (148), responds with “wise and affirmative nods” (4). However, she reveals in the coda that she never confessed her sin or asked forgiveness from her victims: “only in this last version do my lovers end well… while I walk away” (370). In the final version, Briony claims that she will withdraw her testimony after apologizing to Cecilia and Robbie, the lovers reunited in London; in the epilogue, she reveals that this is a fabrication: she “never saw them that year” (370) before their deaths and Lord and Lady Marshall are legally untouchable. Even Nurse Tallis's penance was motivated by a desire to construct herself as altruistic and compassionate. "Sometimes, when a soldier... was suffering greatly, she was touched by an impersonal tenderness that detached her from the suffering, so that she could do her job efficiently and withouthorror. It was then that she understood what nursing could be… She could imagine how she could abandon her writing ambitions and dedicate her life in exchange for these moments of exalted and widespread love. (304) The oxymoron "impersonal tenderness" and the repetition of "could" subvert her claim, while the divine adoration she craves is uncharacteristic of a person constrained by guilt and shame. According to the Puritan doctrine of limited atonement, the death of Jesus secured the salvation of the elect, those blessed with God's grace (Woodlief), among whom Briony would count herself, as an upper-middle-class British author. Briony constructs Turner as a metaphorical Christ figure in Part II through biblical allusions and imagery (Culleton 2009): he shares his "last supper" with Nettle and Mace and later "put his arms around the corporals' shoulders and… dropped his head.” (244). However, in Briony's story, Robbie is not dead and therefore Briony loses redemption. Nonetheless, Briony achieved atonement through empathy. McEwan believes that “imagining what it means to be someone other than ourselves is at the heart of our humanity” and that “cruelty is therefore the failure of imagination” (McEwan 2001). Briony originally committed her crime because she ironically forgot that “others are as real as you” (40) and ruthlessly subordinated reality to fiction – “the truth was in the symmetry” (40). 169), and in the coda Briony admits: “all previous projects were ruthless” (370). Therefore, the fictional end of her victims proves that she has learned to empathize, to imagine others, as autonomous entities, in an authentic way (Finney 2004 p.81). The contradiction of a theological and moral reading of the coda thus subverts the meaning of the novel's title. The metafictional and metanarrational elements of the epilogue intertwine with a reflection on the literary movements and genres parodied by the novel to discuss the nature and “making” of the novel. of fiction” (Finney 2004 p.69). Briony first returns to the first part: “I like these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of details which, cumulatively, give so much satisfaction. » (359) Classical realism draws its quality not from the authenticity of its subject, but from the accuracy of its representation (Watt 1957 p.11). Briony used this technique to convince readers of the truth of the narrator of the first part and the fabricated ending of Robbie and Cecilia's fairy tale. Because of the ambiguity of the denouement, one may wonder whether it is cowardice and immorality or "common sense [and] hope" that push an author to conceal an unsatisfactory resolution, because "who would believe that, if not in the service of the darkest realism? (371) Second, Briony includes Lola and Marshall in the epilogue because they symbolize the modernist belief that corruption and decadence lie beneath beauty (Rahn 2011). “He finally appeared as a cruelly handsome plutocrat” and “there was about her an air of health farm and an indoor tan” (357), and yet they both rose above the others by exploiting them . Revising parts two and three in light of this suggests that behind modernism's own aesthetic – prioritizing style and innovation over character and plot (Wolfreys 2001, p. 121) – lie artificiality and depravity, as they allowed Briony to “drown her guilt in a stream – three streams – of consciousness” (320). Third, Briony links her work – “the drafts are in order and dated, the sources photocopiedlabeled… everything is in the right file” (353) – to his childhood – “the model farm… consisted of the usual animals, but all facing one way… its straight-backed dolls… seemed to have received strict instructions not to touch the walls; various thumb-sized figures…suggested by their equal ranks and spacing of a citizen army awaiting orders” (5) – by similarity of visual imagery. But his introspective reflection, “I always liked to finish well” (353), reminds readers that this novel satirizes the bildungsroman genre; Briony never becomes a reliable narrator, capable of abandoning her reality and fiction to “disorganize” (9) instead of imposing “symmetry” (169). Furthermore, she confirms evidence of a process of editing the third part: "the first version [of Atonement], January 1940, the last, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different versions. » (369) In his letter, Cyril Connolly asks: "Wouldn't it help you if the girl who was watching didn't actually realize that the vase had been broken?" (313) Rereading the first part, readers discover that Briony followed his advice. He also criticizes modernists for neglecting what is at the heart of prose: the reader's “childish desire to be told a story” (314), which calls into question Briony's artistic license. Finally, “The Trials of Arabella” is performed in honor of all the texts that Atonement references to “train productivity” (Finney 2004 p.73), particularly Richardson's Clarissa, used to foreshadow Lola's rape and explain the ideologies that supported Robbie's incrimination and that of Marshall. escape from it. The blatant manipulation of various periods, genres, and literary techniques, revealed in the coda, reminds readers of the dangers and construction of fiction. According to Geoff Dyer, "McEwan uses his novel to show how the subjective or inner transformation" of his characters and the revision of his symbols "can now be seen to have interacted with the wider development of twentieth-century history" ( Dyer 2001), particularly the declining influence of Victorian ideologies on class and sexuality, and the traumatic impact of the war on Britain. . Victorian morality originated primarily from the nouveau riche merchant class; they were driven to control their libido which rose above the natural order proposed by Charles Darwin and the corrupting promiscuity of the aristocracy (Ping). Underlying Briony's misinterpretation was the same snobbery and puritanical sexuality of the British upper-middle class of the early 1900s. She wishes to "spare herself the spectacle of her sister's shame" (38) (being seen by a man in his underwear); considers Robbie's letter "brutal" and "disgusting" (113); and describes him as “immense,” “wild” (123), and bestial, due to his prudish and chaste attitudes toward love. Emily is a product of the naturalization of the Victorian social hierarchy and, as a result, "opposed Jack when he offered to finance [Robbie's] education" because it "felt like interference" (151 ) in the status quo. Tallis's Meissen vase represents the fragility of Cecilia's virginity (Finney 2004 p.77), just as her romantic relationship with Robbie embodies the beginning of a more modern and liberal era of sexuality, and Briony's false testimony, with a “glazed surface of conviction…not without imperfections and fissures” (168), but also foreshadows the fracture of the Tallis family, their class, and British society. This is corroborated by Cecilia's impression of her house: an "unchanging calm, which made it safer than ever.