Briony Lovers Anonymous

Briony Lovers Anonymous

(Except Not Really)

Riley C.

I have never not liked Briony. There are countless attributes of hers that, when taken into separate account, seem awfully selfish, childish, or sociopathic, but there isn't a single person who reads Atonement and is unable to find some of their own dismal qualities in the girl. McEwan has created an Everyman that nobody wants to admit they can relate to, and I believe that's precisely why everyone has such a hard time liking her. Briony Tallis is glaringly human, and that's why I like her so much. She is very in tune with the introspective ambiguity that postmodern societies adorn themselves with, and if you can't enjoy that her mishap of a life bears some semblance to your own, then I'm afraid that you're either a) stuck in the wrong era, or b) unable to come to terms with the fact that you suck just as much as she does. Revel in it. It's kinda fun.

Briony presents truly human amounts of selfishness that I believe everyone enjoys picking on because they don't want to be able to relate to it, but they do. I like it.  Atonement was written as a metanarrative for Briony to feel good about, and now that she's about to lose her mind from a neural disease, this book will be all she has left to remind her about her past. That's incredibly selfish, but humanly so. Briony is aware of what she has done and its consequences but chooses to skirt around it the best she can. "It was always an impossible task," Briony writes, "and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all." (McEwan 351). It isn't something to revere her for, but I think that one has to respect her for making the only person who is now able to feel better (herself) feel better at all, because the society she lives in narrows her into being vehemently selfish. History books were written by the nation they were intended for, so as to disclude the information about that nation's downfalls. No difference, really. Right on, little Tallis. Work with the system.

I think that another reason to celebrate Briony is because she (okay, McEwan, but you get it) gave us a piece of work that makes us glad to be us. As much as Briony wrote this as a metanarrative to herself, the way she bends and twists the horrors and the fabricated remorse gave us the sense of "thank god I'm not any one of those people" that a postmodern public seeks to cling to in order to feel better about themselves. It caters to our own metanarratives, and she is, again, aware of this. She edits the ending of her book for a healthy dose of closure and guilt, and comments on the truthful ending; "what sense or hope of satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account?... No one will care what events and which individuals were misinterpreted to make a novel" (McEwan 150). Briony gave us the lovely ending she knew we would seek because she knew how it made her feel better. Briony recognizes her humanity, and shares it with us. It's a little ambiguous, but hey, that's what postmodernity is, it's the way you can lie to someone, yourself even, and still feel better about it than you would have the truth. I think you can like her for giving us that small release, if only for a little while. She's clever and aware of not only herself but us, and that makes me like her an awful lot.

Admittedly, I didn't want to believe that I'm selfish and that I lie to myself and others all the time, but once I came to terms with it I found myself enjoying the chaos and pointlessness of life quite a bit; I felt myself becoming able to connect with Briony and I came to like her. It's a postmodern thing, I think, to be able to like her, because in a modern worldview (perhaps that of Robbie or Cee? Hmm) she's absolutely despicable for evading the truth and living with it. Briony isn't really too far off from you or I, and she knows that, writing, "however withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe" (McEwan 336). I think it's reasonable to like her, and shows that you know a little more about the world around you than most.

RE: Cassandra's Post

I quite like your outlook on little Briony, but I don't know if it quite checks out if you're considering the book as a postmodern work. Although she does strive for the modern sense of control and tries to force a truth that isn't there during Part One, I'd have to agree with Roman when he said that Briony's merely a postmodern personality that's being forced into the victorian/modern mould. She continuously struggles with the validity of truth that Jessup brings up in his article that we read, and in Part Three and 1999 we see the full-fledged embracing of the void in Briony. A woman who wants her terminal diagnosis straight and to-the-point and takes pleasure in thinking about her doctor dying one day as well, even though she knows he's not at fault for her illness. A woman who has been courageous enough to endure the horrors of postWWII hospitals and come out still relatively sane; A woman who has spent her whole life waiting for an era to come along that she can identify with, and it's finally become full-fledged, just as she's in her dying years. Briony isn't weak, sad, or hard on herself at all, in my opinion - she's simply a thriving postmodern being, much like any of us. She is aware of everything, knows all eras she has lived through, and chooses to paste together her own truth using her vast knowledge. Some say that you can only manipulate something once you know it inside and out, and I think this is truly the atonement for Briony, the amalgamation of all that she's been through can finally come to this novel that she's happy with, and that gives the reader a great sense of catharsis, if only for a few pages until McEwan drops the essential postmodern bomb that it wasn't real at all.


aaaannnnyyyywaaaayyyssss, I still like your ideas and your use of the text to back it up, but I think it's important not to lose sight of this novel's value as a postmodern piece.