Atonement: Themes | SparkNotes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Power of Storytelling

Structured as a story within a story, Atonement itself is a testament to how powerful storytelling can be. Briony Tallis, the protagonist, believes from a young age that her talent for writing and storytelling allows her to control those around her. In the hands of a thirteen-year-old girl, this talent proves to be a double-edged sword. At the beginning of the novel, Briony has a proclivity to use her precocious imagination to fill in the blanks when she is ignorant about certain aspects of a situation. Her relatively sheltered life causes her to only see the world in stories she can understand. The scene at the fountain with Cecilia and Robbie vexes Briony because it does not fulfill the archetype of a damsel in distress and the pauper who rescues her. And due to her lack of awareness of adult sexuality, she views Cecilia and Robbie’s relationship as violent and coerced instead of loving and consensual. This habit, along with Briony’s arrogance as a writer who thinks she is omniscient, leads her to accuse Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Briony’s insistence on viewing the world through the lens of a story is what causes her to create her own tale that will lead to the downfall of two people she cares about.

On the other hand, once the fallout from Briony’s crime is complete and she understands that she made a mistake, she uses her talent to give Cecilia and Robbie the fictional happy ending that neither lived long enough to experience in real life. While this may seem insufficient given that they both died long ago, Briony’s story, told with as much truth as possible, allows Cecilia and Robbie to live on, if only in people’s imaginations.

The Nature of Perspective

Part One of the novel depicts several events told from different people’s perspectives, showing how tricky it can be to truly see objective reality. Not only do proximity to and involvement with an event influence perspective, but so do the unique life experiences and biases that each person brings to a situation. The scene between Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain is the first time a misunderstanding occurs due to different people’s perspectives. Cecilia takes her clothes off and dives into the fountain as a sort of defiance of Robbie in response to her own attraction. However, Briony believes Cecilia is acting out of fear of Robbie. When Briony walks into the library, she does not know that Cecilia and Robbie have admitted their love for each other. To her, small and frail-looking Cecilia pushed up against the bookshelf by Robbie looks like assault.

It is not only Briony’s limited perspective that causes trouble. Emily’s resentment of her sister, Hermione, and her desire for Cecilia to get married blind her to the danger presented by Paul Marshall, as she thinks nothing of Paul speaking to Lola in the nursery and assumes Lola is being overly dramatic about her injuries. These scenes show how not questioning one’s own perspective and assumptions can have devastating consequences.

The Pull of Regret

Although Briony is absolutely sure of herself while accusing Robbie in Part One, by the time she is eighteen years old, in Part Three, the regret she feels for what she did is overwhelming. Instead of attending Cambridge, which would allow her to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, Briony is training as a nurse as penance for her crime. Only at the end of the novel is it revealed how deep her regret goes. As Cecilia and Robbie both died in 1940, Briony was never able to make things right with them. Not only did her crime wrongly put Robbie in jail, but it ultimately led to both of their deaths. Briony has spent her life trying to do what little she can to preserve the memories of Cecilia and Robbie. In her own story, Briony does not receive forgiveness from Cecilia and Robbie, showing she knows that expecting forgiveness for what she did is not plausible even in fiction. Even while working, falling in love, and getting older, Briony has tried to assuage her guilt and regret by writing the perfect draft of the story of Cecilia and Robbie, stuck trying to fix the immovable past.

Childhood versus Adulthood

When the novel begins, Briony is thirteen years old, already on the cusp between childhood and young adulthood. The arrival of her cousin Lola seems to make Briony self-conscious of her childish tendencies, and she suddenly has the desire to become an adult. Briony feels that the events she witnesses between Cecilia and Robbie have matured her sufficiently, so that by the time of Lola’s assault, she believes she has fully entered adulthood. However, Briony’s assumptions and ignorance of certain topics show just how immature she still really is. Her eagerness to go from child to adult overnight demonstrates why growing up is a process instead of a switch that can be turned on and off. Even by the time Briony is eighteen, though she has realized that what she did was wrong, she still justifies her actions and is unable to visit Cecilia or confront Lola or Paul Marshall. And at the age of seventy-seven, Briony celebrates her birthday in her childhood home and still feels some of the same resentment toward Lola that she did at the age of thirteen. Briony’s progress shows that while growing up should not be rushed, some childish elements of ourselves never fully go away.

Next section Motifs