Role Of Guilt In Atonement

After reading a novel such as Atonement, one is forced to question oneself, one’s past mistakes, what one did in an attempt to right one’s wrongdoings and whether or not one’s efforts will be enough. Guilt and regret can often fill oneself after making such mistake and in an effort to rid oneself of the guilt, often an apology is made to the one the wrongdoing was made against. However, amendments are not always enough; apologies do not erase scars and often times, not even the guilt from the committed sin can be washed away completely. Briony Tallis herself struggled her entire life with not only the internal guilt she felt but the desire to atone her mistake with her sister. In the flash of a moment, Briony does not realize that her actions …show more content…
From the very first pages of the novel readers “meet an instance of Briony’s literary imagination before [they] get to know her as a personality” (Finney). At the ripe age of thirteen Briony “is an author first, and a girl on the verge of entering adolescence secondly” (Finney). Because of this, Briony cannot see the world clearly as it is; she lives in a fictive world. Similar to in her writings, to Briony there is only right and wrong, establishing her inability to see that there are gray areas in between the two. Her failure to see the gray eventually adds to her readiness to accuse Robbie Turner of raping Lola. There are three critical events that lead to Briony committing her crime, all of which have the common denominator of Briony’s inability to understand what is happening in front of her: the fountain scene, the vulgar letter from Robbie and the intimate moment exchanged between Cecilia and Robbie in the library. The possibility that her sister Cecilia could actually be consenting to these actions fly completely above Briony’s ignorant mind as she is too young to fathom adult motives and desires. Briony’s “powerful imagination works to confuse the real with the fictive … [and her] observation of life around her is conditioned by the fictive world that holds her in its grip” (Finney). Due to this, after Briony witnesses these events, her mind …show more content…
At thirteen, Briony believes that accusing Robbie of raping Lola is the key to justice for Cecilia and all that Robbie has done to her. However, this form of finding justice changes a few years later when Briony realizes that she has made a mistake and put an innocent man in jail. Thus, her new mission of achieving justice becomes revealing the truth of what happened that summer in 1935; Briony spends her entire life writing the true story of that summer. She intentionally chooses to change one crucial part of the story: the ending. Years later, Briony admits that “[i]t is only in this last version [of the story,] that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away” (Ewan 350). Briony makes the argument that she changes this for the sake of the readers as she questions, “Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfill their love?” (Ewan 350). It is questionable as to whether Briony truly does this for the readers’s enjoyment or simply an attempt at putting her own peace of mind at ease. Regardless, Briony knows that she cannot publish her work yet as revealing the truths about Lola and Marshall, before both have passed away, would be catastrophic as they “have been active about the courts since the late forties, defending their good names with a most expensive ferocity… [that] could ruin a publishing house