CliffsNotes on McEwan's Atonement by Curry Kennedy

Author:Curry Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Analysis

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous one. Just as Cecilia struggled to find an outfit, Briony struggles to find the words to describe her experience. Briony’s writer’s block stems from an internal conflict between seeing Cecilia and Robbie’s altercation by the fountain and her lingering desire to live in the world of childhood, where it would be easy to identify Robbie as “the incarnation of evil.”

Just as her sister Cecilia comforted the twins in the previous chapter, Briony comforts Lola in this one. But the sisters’ methods and motives for comforting the Quinceys differ in significant ways. When Cecilia helps Jackson and Pierrot, her attention to detail and empathetic nature allow her to adopt the boys’ point of view. Entering their story, she cares for them on their own terms. Briony, on the other hand, comforts Lola by drawing her into her own developing story about the evil of Robbie Turner. If she had paid more attention to the severity of Lola’s wounds, Briony would have been able to see, as the adults will in the next chapter, that the twins were unlikely to have been capable of inflicting such harm. Caring well requires attention to the details that defy easy explanation. Briony cannot yet overcome her biases and snap judgments to see that. Hence, she misunderstands what she sees in the library.

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