Imagination Vs Reason In Atonement

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You will wake up. It’s another week day. As usual stress, boredom and academic pressure invades your mind and sinks your heart. It seems that our lives are just one long routine where we must conform to rules and be so logical and act unadventurously. So, at times, we need to escape. Fortunately, we have the magic of imagination to amuse us and sustain our lucidness and revitalise our passions and dreams. Atonement’s key philosophical issue is the power of imagination versus reason. Imagination is Briony’s oxygen; and without it she feels herself “shrinking” (p76). Accordingly, her love for fiction writing is colossal, she believes that inking letters onto pages is “magical”; “a story [is] a form of telepathy”, it “send[s] thoughts and feelings …show more content…

He captivates readers by exercising his creative mind and writing mindset to masterfully insert imaginary characters into historical events. However, at the end he sucker punched us detaching the joyful, fictive world and divulging the harsh truth of reality, displaying that Briony, a fiction author formulated the novel. This demonstrates that imagination is preferable to reason, it can conceal despair. McEwan’s visually rich descriptions, engaging characters and inclusion of diverse events were significant to my reading of Atonement, they allowed me to relate to the power of imagination and how it can often elevate life through immersing it in entertainment and encouraging minds to pursue passions and dreams. He thus used his visionary ability to construct a ‘world view’ depicting, - imagination is a wonderful and most valuable tool when used wisely. He cautions that imagination must not be utilised to misperceive reality as the consequences can be tragic. When used sensibly, imagination is a portal to self-discovery, it stimulates people to delve into the future, granting them ideas and inspiration, which encourages them to then employ reasoning and hard-work to fulfil dreams, passions and enjoy a full