The Power of Storytelling

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own?

In Chapter Three, after rehearsals for Briony’s play The Trials of Arabella have been delayed yet again, Briony sits in the nursery regarding her clothes, thinking she should dress more grown-up like Lola, when she takes notice of her hands. Here, Briony seems to be wondering whether she is in control of her own fingers and, by extension, the story she creates with them. Briony’s stories are of course created in her own imagination and not by command of her fingertips. However, this scene foreshadows how Briony allows the stories she tells herself to run away from her, as if they are too powerful and real for her to take control over.

Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.

In Chapter Thirteen, when Briony finds Lola by the island temple, Briony had not actually seen the face of Lola’s assaulter. However, Briony was predisposed to believe it was Robbie after seeing him by the fountain with Cecilia, reading his letter, and walking in on him and Cecilia in the library. While Lola will not name anyone in particular, Briony feels that all of these events have connected in a way that she knows the truth without having seen the man himself. Briony’s obsession with storytelling, as well as her tendency to see herself at the center of things, leads her to only think about what would make sense in a novel instead of seeing the objective reality.

The more he described, the more certain he was that the room was close by. His words were bringing it into being.

In Part Two, as Robbie and Nettle look for somewhere to eat their food, Robbie thinks of a charming restaurant where he would like to sit and eat and thinks of how he would describe it to Nettle in detail. This line, supposedly from Robbie’s perspective, is an indication that Robbie is not the true narrator of this scene. Robbie, who had a degree in literature and planned on attending medical school, struggled while writing a letter to Cecilia, unable to put his feelings into writing. However, Briony established in Part One that she felt her words were capable of building an entire world. As it is revealed at the end of the novel that Briony is the author of this story, it makes sense that her characters would see storytelling to be as powerful a gift as she does.

She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin.

In Part Three, after Briony has paid her visit to Cecilia and Robbie and promised to recant her testimony about Robbie in writing, she resolves to write “a new draft, an atonement.” In the next section, we learn that she was referring to a new draft of Two Figures by a Fountain, which had been rejected by Horizon magazine. Briony’s atonement for her crime, and for the preceding deaths of both Robbie and Cecilia, is a retelling of the story exactly as it happened, except with a happy ending for the two lovers. Briony’s commitment to writing this story shows that she believes storytelling is powerful enough to make right her previous wrong and that at least Cecilia and Robbie can be together in a fictional world.

The Pull of Regret

She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied. She never was.

In Chapter Thirteen, after Briony tells Lola that Robbie was the man who assaulted Lola, the narration moves forward to the statements Briony will give to the police in the following days before returning to the present. Briony remains confident that she knows Robbie to be the rapist, but this thought foreshadows the guilt that will live with her forever. When she finally comes to realize her mistake, she understands that she alone was responsible for falsely accusing Robbie. Had her parents or Lola corroborated her statement, she may not feel her regret as intensely as she would not be the only one to blame. However, she alone was the reason for Robbie’s arrest and eventual death.

Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it, whatever illumination in tutorial she had relinquished, or lifetime moment on a college lawn, she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable.

In Part Three, while Briony is training as a nurse, she receives a letter from her father with news that Lola Quincey is engaged to marry Paul Marshall. Upset by this news, Briony again feels the sting of guilt and regret that has been with her since she realized her mistake in accusing Robbie as Lola’s rapist. With these lines, Briony reveals the reason for her decision to become a nurse instead of attending Cambridge: She is punishing herself for her crime. In performing manual labor and caring for others instead of indulging in her academic dreams, she hopes to assuage some of the regret she feels. However, after learning that she sent an innocent man to jail, drove away her sister, and failed to report the true rapist, Briony knows she can never make up for what she did and that regret will be with her forever.

The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have happened.

In Part Three, as Briony sits with Fiona in the park on a rare afternoon off, Briony begins to wonder where Robbie is fighting and whether he will come back alive. Suddenly, her own personal crime is intertwined with the horrors of war, and the gravity of her mistake is clearer to her than ever. Here, she reflects on what is at the heart of anyone’s regret, the fact that the past is utterly unchangeable. Briony has tried to think of what she can do to fix the situation but finds that the only solution is impossible, a truth that only compounds her guilt.

Now was her chance to proclaim in public all the private anguish and purge herself of all that she had done wrong. Before the altar of this most rational of churches. But the scratches and bruises were long healed, and all her own statements at the time were to the contrary.

In Part Three, as Briony watches the wedding of Lola and Paul, she considers voicing her objection when the vicar asks if there is any reason the two should not be married. Briony feels that speaking out and telling others what happened may alleviate the burden of regret she has been carrying around all this time. After all, Paul Marshall was the criminal and deserving of punishment. However, Briony realizes that with the event so far back in the past and without any concrete evidence, her attempt to correct her previous statement would be for nothing. Again, Briony is faced with the reality that she cannot correct her mistake and instead must live with the regret.

I gave them happiness, but I was not quite so self-serving as to let them forgive me.

In the section of the novel titled “London, 1999,” after her birthday dinner in 1999, Briony reflects on the ending of her novel, with Cecilia and Robbie happily together. She acknowledges that while that ending is not completely far-fetched, an ending in which they forgive her is out of the realm of possibility. Though Briony longed for their forgiveness, she understands that even if they had lived, she likely never would have received it. It seems that Briony has made peace with the fact that she will never be rid of the regret she feels for as long as she lives.

Childhood versus Adulthood

Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a two full years’ refinement weigh against her, and now her play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing.

When Briony gets her cousins together to rehearse her play in Chapter One, the twins resist while Lola reminds them to be amenable. Briony realizes that none of them are excited to perform the play. Even though Lola is being polite about it, Briony feels that Lola is talking down to her and thinks she is using some form of manipulation but is not sure to what end. Here, Briony feels childish in comparison to Lola. While two years may not seem like a significant age difference, Briony understands that the gap in maturity between thirteen and fifteen can be incredibly wide. For the first time, Briony is self-conscious of her own immaturity, which is one of the first steps in the journey from childhood to adulthood.

She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

In Chapter Seven, after abandoning her play, Briony slashes at nettles, ready to be done with being a child. However, she does not quite know how to make this transition and so decides she will wait for something to happen that will catapult her into adulthood. This line of thinking shows how truly childish and innocent she still is, as she does not understand that becoming an adult is a process influenced by both internal and external factors. However, what ends up happening while she waits on the bridge does lead to a turning point in her life, as Robbie gives her the note that she will then read and misinterpret. Because Briony is still too much of a child to realize she is not yet an adult, she will make a decision that will forever change the lives of Cecilia and Robbie as well as her own.

Her childhood had ended, she decided now as she came away from the swimming pool, the moment she tore down her poster. The fairy stories were behind her, and in the space of a few hours she had witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, interrupted brutal behavior, and by incurring the hatred of an adult whom everyone had trusted, she had become a participant in the drama of life beyond the nursery.

In Chapter Thirteen, as Briony searches for the twins, she reflects on all she has witnessed that day and believes that what she’s seen is enough to make her a full-fledged adult. Again, Briony seems to think that the transition from childhood to adulthood is like flipping a switch and can occur in one day. Although she purports to be horrified by Robbie’s behavior, she seems to be almost gleefully excited by finally having some drama in her life, which also shows her relative immaturity. At this point, Briony is only minutes away from finding Lola and accusing Robbie. Had she not been so naively sure that she was an adult, she may not have made her accusation with such confidence.

Poor vain and vulnerable Lola with the pearl-studded choker and the rosewater scent, who longed to throw off the last restraints of childhood, who saved herself from humiliation by falling in love, or persuading herself she had, and who could not believe her luck when Briony insisted on doing the talking and blaming.

In Part Three, while Briony watches the wedding of Paul Marshall and Lola, she thinks of how desperately Lola wanted to be seen as an adult that summer of 1935. While Briony at thirteen was intimidated by Lola’s sophistication, Briony now recognizes that fifteen-year-old Lola was still a child. While Briony cannot know Lola’s motivations for protecting Paul, here Briony thinks that Lola perhaps blamed herself for the assault, as she initially welcomed Paul’s attention, and is marrying Paul to convince herself that the act was actually consensual. Briony feels pity for how naive Lola was to believe this and guilt that her own childish arrogance has led Lola to marry her rapist. Only by finally being an adult and having a bit of perspective is Briony able to understand how foolish and innocent they both were.

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