In Atonement, McEwan reveals in the final section, "London, 1999", that the previous story was a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and calling into question all previous events that the reader had assumed to be objectively true. McEwan first signals this shift by switching to the first-person perspective of Briony, a seventy-seven-year-old woman, and through vague allusions to her current novel. Finally, she directly discusses her "last novel, the one that should have been (her) first" and its subject "our crime – Lola's, Marshall's, mine", both statements revealing the guilt that pursued her and led her to create in this way. numerous drafts of his story over fifty-nine years. His attempt to achieve sympathy is intentional, but limited. The same approach to questions of art and empathy emerges in another of McEwan's novels, Saturday, which focuses on current events: here textual and literary art forms move the characters towards somewhat higher states of understanding, but also and paradoxically serve to reveal failures of empathy. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. McEwan implies that the optimistic ending of the penultimate section is also false. Briony admits that "only in this last version do my lovers have a happy ending", and that she chose this ending because she doesn't see the point in telling a reader that "Robbie Turner died of 'sepsis at Bray Dunes' or that 'Cecilia was killed in September of that year by the bomb which destroyed Balham tube station. These revelations reinforce the mistake she made as a child, since her misunderstanding cost them all the time they would have had, rather than just years of the eventual life they would have had together. The purpose of the “art” in the form of the novel that Briony has written is now to atone for her past crime – a lack of empathy and understanding – by trying to empathize with Cecilia and Robbie by writing them. McEwan later wrote in the aftermath of 9/11: "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than ourselves is at the heart of our humanity." This creative effort is therefore his effort to repay a moral debt and give “to my lovers.” ", the happy ending they never experienced in reality. Atonement art is often not a perfect channel for empathy in its truest form, however, as the possessive indicates "my lovers": she speaks as if she had created them herself and I still cannot imagine them as people separate from her McEwan introduces the novel with an epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, where Henry Tilney reprimands Catherine Morland for her wild suspicions driven by her love of Gothic literature and an overactive imagination. In the final section, the older Briony takes on Tilney's role by dismissing herself as a "busy, arrogant, vain little girl". while watching the play she had written, as the presence of literature in the girl's life encouraged her to treat the people around her as characters to be realized or written about. miniature” as a young girl represents a desire to move and control others through the process of fiction, rather than a desire for “telepathy” through fiction. she describes in the first chapter, the term supernatural reflecting its impossibility. This compulsion to move others as she wishes may corrupt her ability to atone through a novel, as changing the ending may be a moral choice for their memory and for the reader, butcould also be an attempt to absolve herself personally because she is only one person. responsible for the years lost together rather than the lives lost. The deception involved recalls her initial mistake, and even she admits that in the latest version of her novel she has "not traveled so far after all, since I wrote my little book."play" (referring to the happy ending constructed). Even though Briony chastises herself about her youth, she still recognizes that by placing herself as the perpetrator and giving herself "absolute power to decide the outcomes" she has complicated her attempt at empathy because she has become like God with this “absolute power” and there is no one other than herself to forgive him. The art still allows him to imagine empathy with Cecilia and Robbie, but the solipsism of the art form itself and the way it shapes the ending prevents true "atonement": his empathy is misguided and ultimately insufficient . McEwan wrote the novel Saturday in 2003 in response to the shock of 9/11 and what he sees as a crime of insufficient empathy, as the central character's professionally comfortable and personally happy life is disrupted by unexpected violence. His reaction to the September 11 attacks in London in The Guardian expressed the shock of these terrorist attacks reaching the Western world: “We have been rudely awakened from a pleasant dream. The city will not regain the confidence and joy of Wednesday for a very long time. When violence intrudes into the Perownes household, Henry also emerges from a "dreamy interlude" of his own. The political repercussions of the real-world event are present in the background leading up to the Perownes' personal attack, but Henry does not appear to have much empathy toward foreign struggles. When he and Daisy argue, he is aware that he is only responding to her contradictory tone and that "they are fighting for armies they will never see and know nothing about". In keeping with Theo's advice to "think small" and avoid acknowledging global suffering, Henry's sense of empathy only extends to his family. He can't fully imagine the protesters' motivations, but listening to his son Théo's song, he is inspired by an ideological unity like that the protesters dream of: "There are those rare moments when musicians touch something together sweeter than they have ever found before. during rehearsals or performances, beyond simple collaboration or technical mastery, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. That's when they give us a glimpse of what we could be, the best of ourselves and an impossible world in which we give everything we have to others, but lose nothing of ourselves …The Kingdom of Christ on earth, the paradise of workers, the ideal Islamic state. (p 176) The "Islamic State" is still left until the end of this triadic thought and structure, almost as a dark punchline or an inaccessible example that must be introduced through gradual escalations, but the art produces by his son allows the character of Henri to develop. almost experiencing an idealistic and united movement. This empathy is not inherent to the character; it is produced by the camaraderie of the group, the artistic medium, and his emotional connection to his son. As a scientific and non-literary man, however, he is unable to connect through his daughter's literary medium. In the scene where Daisy reads the poem “Dover Beach,” a powerful empathy clearly influences Baxter even as McEwan writes from the point of view of Henry who is confused and distant from this connection. The physical changes that Henry notices, such as ".