Atonement Essays

12th Grade

Atonement

Set in in England during the developments of World War II, Atonement is a multi-dimensional historical narrative that combines the ideas of fantasy versus fiction with love and war. As 13-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the romance between her...

Atonement

Ian McEwan’s Atonement draws inspiration from and alludes to a vast number of 20th century modernist authors and works, both stylistically and thematically. For a novel to be considered a successful culmination to the reading of a large body of...

College

Atonement

In Ian McEwan’s award winning novel Atonement young Briony Tallis must try and make amends for her wrongdoings toward her older sister Cecelia and her love interest, Robbie. At the end of the novel, the short, twenty-page coda entitled “London,...

11th Grade

Atonement

Both Briony Tallis, of Atonement, and Leo Colston, of The Go-Between, spend significant periods of their adolescence in large country homes, both of which are surrounded by large estates. Hartley and McEwan use the landscapes which are present...

College

Atonement

In Atonement, Ian McEwan suggests the dangers of confusing our fantasies with reality; that we have become so accustomed to choosing to see what we wish to see rather than reality and this leads to destruction in our lives. Our refusal to accept...

College

Atonement

In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left...

12th Grade

Atonement

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”-Psalms 82:6

It is an impossible task for an author not to project his or her own private biases onto a page. Theistic writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were...

12th Grade

Atonement

“I put it all there as a matter of historical record… We will all only exist as my inventions. No one will care what events and which individuals were misinterpreted to make a novel… How can a novelist achieve atonement when… she is also God? In...

12th Grade

Atonement

Through their respective texts, Atonement and Lantana, authors Ian McEwan and Ray Lawrence expertly convey the ideas of betrayal, atonement, loss and class. Within Atonement, McEwan employs stylistic features repetition, motif, symbolism and...

College

Atonement

In Atonement, McEwan reveals in the final section, ‘London, 1999,’ that the previous narrative had been a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and calling into question all the previous events the reader had assumed...

College

Atonement

Though Robbie Turner knows he is innocent of his purported crime, this knowledge hardly relieves his inner turmoil. Much of his time spent fighting in the war is also spent fighting with himself; he is unable to escape the constant fantasies of...

12th Grade

Atonement

Truth is a universal theme that has been the fascination of people since the dawn of time. It is the underlying, almost primal reason that urges mankind to progress; a noble quest for knowledge, and an uneasiness that the essence of truth will...

12th Grade

Atonement

One of the main ideas explored in both The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, and Atonement, a film directed by Joe Wright, is the everlasting presence of the past in the lives of the protagonists, both of whom make a mistake in their...