Antithesis Of Atonement

It is often in life that one may find one’s self in the scenario where one feels guilty for having wronged another person. It is at the same time that one might think that what they have done is unforgivable and that they will never be able to atone for their misdeeds. Ian McEwan believes this is untrue, and illustrates the antithesis of this in his novel Atonement. In Atonement the main character, Briony Tallis, responds to the great injustice imposed upon Robbie Turner by disowning her family and seeking to make amends with her sister, Cecilia Tallis, in hopes of finding forgiveness; this search for forgiveness as well as the success Briony finds in her search illustrates the message of always seeking forgiveness for the wrongdoings that one inflicts on others. When Briony is a child, she witnesses a series of events between her sister Cecilia and her neighbor Robbie, and since Briony is still young, her understanding of the world is not complete, yet “her interpretation of each action and interaction around her is shaped by her understanding of what she has seen” (Messud 23) and she “believes absolutely in the inevitability of the story she constructs” (Messud 23). Theis story

The difference in Briony’s age between when she commits her wrongdoing and when she begins to seek forgiveness conveys the idea that even if a long stretch of time has passed since one has wronged another, forgiveness is still attainable. Furthermore, in the third section of the novel, McEwan directly address the reader through a monologue of Briony’s about how he feels that having Robbie die before Briony’s search came to a close would have diluted the story. The fact that McEwan chose to keep Robbie alive shows that he believes that forgiveness is not just always attainable, but always worthy of being