Atonement for Briony?

Erica Kang

While I can’t exactly say I like Briony, she has a few admirable traits that people can relate to or identify with. For example, she continues to rewrite her life. How many of us would like to or have actually rewritten parts of our lives or something that we did in order to allow ourselves to live with, or make sound better. The point of this is, what is truth? Whose truth are we talking about, there is no actual truth, just perceptions of the truth. For example, “I never saw them that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister” (McEwan 350). Briony owns up to the fact that the story is a fabrication intended to make her look better. The effect of Briony’s narrative is to create layers of truths and untruths and this is what each of us do in our lives. This is closer to reality than the romantic or modern novel can achieve. This is why I feel people should relate to Briony’s character.

We can like Briony because we should be operating from the point of view of forgiveness, not condemnation. In the novel, no one ever gives Briony a second chance. A perfect example of this is when Briony says, ““I’m very very sorry. I’ve caused you such terrible distress.” They continued to stare at her, and she repeated herself. “I’m very sorry”” (McEwan 329). Robbie and Cecilia never acknowledge her apology, they simply stare at her. Cecilia even says, “I won’t ever forgive you” (McEwan 318). So Briony’s reward for her forgiveness is more alienation. Briony is then justified in continuing to rewrite her own story since it is demonstrated that she is completely alone. Almost no one likes to be alone all their lives. We can have sympathy for her and identify with her, making her a likeable character. We can forgive her especially because she asks for forgiveness multiple times even though she never really did tell anyone the truth. Everybody makes mistakes and they, like Briony, are deserving of many new chances. The readers can see themselves in Briony especially because they’ve been her age before. Briony can’t be expected to know everything, considering she’s only thirteen. At thirteen, she is just coming out of childhood, and has no working, real world experience. Her assumptions are likely to be naīve and not well informed. So, she is more likely to make mistakes as there is not one person in the world who has never made a mistake. It is really unfortunate that Briony always seems to have to pay for her mistakes and the readers can identify with that. Briony may not be completely likeable because she brings us closer to the truth about ourselves and that makes us uncomfortable. In addition, people always assume that what happens to Briony is her fault. For example when Lola is raped, Briony is not entirely convinced it was Robbie and has to state it out loud three times to convince herself it was him who she saw, and Lola knows it wasn’t Robbie but doesn’t say anything. We can sympathize with this because Lola is equally at fault but this never crosses anyone’s mind. Briony takes all the blame. Although this doesn’t make her likeable, we can empathize with her dilemma.

Lastly, as a character, it’s easy to admire her creative ability to convince others of circumstances. For example, once Lola was raped, everybody believes Briony’s accusation that Robbie is the rapist automatically. They believe her because she presents herself as the primary witness. It takes a lot of confidence for her to present her version of the evidence to the authorities because she’s having a hard time convincing herself of Robbie’s said crime. In addition, the reader can admire Briony because of her creative ability to continually rewrite her past in so many ways. This is admirable because it creates a novel within a novel within a novel and is a clever form of storytelling. To conclude, readers may not like Briony but ultimately may find that much about her is a reflection of themselves. Briony is naīve, as many of us still are, creative, manipulative, and very capable of recreating herself many times over.

RE: Roman (don’t hate me)

I think this comment took me longer to craft than the post itself and maybe I’m wrong, but I think you are confused about the post modern direction in the macro, and Briony as a sociopath in the micro. Let’s begin with the latter, Briony. I believe that Briony is likeable, or at least a “normal” person, just because….the post modern novel is reality. The modern novel is guilty of a romantic vision, where everyone walks off into the sunset and the ending is happy and the reader gets to enjoy the vision on an up note. Life is not generally like that; it often...sucks. Sometimes we are afforded a glimpse at happiness if we are lucky. All around us; third world countries lack food; pollution is wrecking our climate; our politicians are arguing and giving themselves raises, and we are under the belief that we “deserve” a good life. Briony is just a simple example of how the average human being rewrites their story every hour, every minute of every day. We spin everything. Politicians spin their political platforms. We choose every day not to believe we are killing our world. We choose every day to ignore third world problems. We choose every day to rephrase something about how we handled our day. Briony is likeable because she deconstructs and reconstructs her own life every day, and does it consciously….we should be so honest. Try living in a world where there is no belief in a happy ending. That is reality; Briony’s reality, our reality.

Now let’s take a look at the former: you claim that Briony is a sociopath. What if Briony is just….normal? Perhaps a little passive aggressive, but normal. The postmodern novel doesn’t pull any punches with decorating the characters with traits that aren’t really viable in the real world, and Briony has one of those characters. Unpolished, unbuffed, not fluffed up, she is a victim, she sees herself as a victim, and she is closer to a real life character because she is writing her own novel. She tells it like it is. We all make mistakes, each and every day. Most of us hide them, feel guilty about them, spin them into something else, or are just plain not conscious of them. That is what life is really like. Life is the postmodern novel.

Again, maybe I’m wrong, but I think you are a bit off regarding the direction and intent of the postmodern novel as a whole, and existentialism as an element. The intent of the postmodern novel is to shed light on our gothic and romantic, linear tradition and to stimulate people to think about our assumptions. We need to thank Briony because she causes us to question our assumptions. I’m not sure that you do, because you have not defined the function of the tools that you are quoting nor explained how they assist the positive portrayal of Briony. That is why I think you are confused about the purpose of the postmodern novel, and about the role of the character of Briony. Briony acts as a foil, a device by which we can gage our own consciousness or lack thereof and extent by which we are romanced by our era and society.