6.1.2

Briony in Part One

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Briony Tallis in Part One of Atonement

We first see Briony as the youngest child in the Tallis family. As a result, she is rather distant from the rest of her family, often escaping into fantasy worlds which she recreates through her gift for storytelling.

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The Trials of Arabella

  • Briony is a budding writer who, at the beginning of the novel, has just completed her first play, The Trials of Arabella.
  • Significantly, this text has been written with a moral purpose in mind - to persuade her brother, Leon, to settle down and marry – just as the novel we are reading has a moral purpose – to atone for the crime against Robbie and Cecilia.
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Briony's "controlling demon"

  • Linked to Briony’s creative instincts is an urge to order the world around her.
  • McEwan uses diabolic imagery to describe this impulse as her “controlling demon”. This hints at its destructive potential.
  • We see this in an episode that both Briony and Robbie refer to – Briony deliberately falling into the pool and forcing Robbie to save her. In re-enacting the defining moment of one of her stories, Briony blurs the line between fiction and reality in a dangerous way, provoking Robbie's fury.
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Briony's detachment from others

  • At other times in Part One, we see Briony as coldly detached from the feelings of those around her.
  • When the twins run away and are thought to be in danger, Briony thinks about how she might describe them in fiction if she was to discover them drowned in the pool.
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Briony's life stage in Part One

  • Briony is caught between childhood and adulthood. She is beginning to become aware of the complexities of the adult world but is still too young to interpret this world correctly – her misreading of the scene by the fountain is the first of several misinterpretations she makes which will result in tragedy.
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Briony turns on Robbie

  • As a consequence of these misinterpretations, Briony turns against Robbie.
  • She later admits to having had a brief, childish infatuation with Robbie but dismisses this as a possible motivation for her accusation against him.
  • Robbie, however, is not so sure and develops a “theory” that it may lie at the root of Briony’s behaviour. Readers are left to decide for themselves what importance they attach to this.
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"It was Robbie"

  • At the moment of crisis in the novel, you could argue that Briony ‘leads’ Lola into confirming Robbie’s guilt by dropping the tag question “wasn’t it?” to remove all possibility of doubt and simply declare, “It was Robbie.”

Briony's reflections on Part One

  • In the final pages, Briony looks back at herself and sees a “busy, priggish, conceited little girl” (p367).
  • In sticking to her story, Briony becomes the centre of adult attention, something she clearly enjoys. She feels “outrage” at Robbie’s heroic return with the twins the following morning, as if “cheated” (p184) of her place at the rightful centre of the drama. Again, the lack of consideration given to others' feelings in this part of the novel help to depict her as rather callous.

Jump to other topics

1Introduction to Atonement

2Chapter Summaries & Analysis: Part One

3Chapter Summaries & Analysis: Part Two

4Chapter Summaries & Analysis: Part Three

5Chapter Summaries & Analysis: Part Four

5.1Epilogue: London, 1999 - Pages 353-371

6Key Character Profiles

7Key Themes

8Writing Techniques

9Context

10Critical Debates

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