Genre

In many ways, *Atonement* is a typical postmodern novel.

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Genre of Atonement: Epilogue & "C.C."s Letter

In many ways, Atonement is a typical postmodern novel.

Atonement is self-reflexive, meaning that it draws attention to its own artificiality as a work of fiction.
The date and signature at the end of Part Three sets up the conceit that Briony is the ‘writer’ of the novel we have been reading and that we, like Briony, have just finished a freshly completed final draft of the novel.

The epilogue (London, 1999) adds another layer of narrative to the text.
This metanarrative reveals that the description of the visit to Cecilia is purely an invention by the ‘real’ author of the text, Briony.
This admission draws further attention to the fact that the text is an artificial construct put together by Briony and not a ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ version of events.

We are also shown how Briony’s novel evolves.
In her teens, she writes a short story, Two Figures by a Fountain, based on “the crystalline present moment” (p312) when Cecilia observes Robbie and Cecilia by the Triton fountain.

McEwan provides us with the whole text of a letter from “C.C.”, the editor of Horizon Literary Journal explaining his decision not to publish this story but also offering encouragement and advice on how Briony can improve it by providing a more developed “narrative”, advice Briony clearly takes on board.
In another blurring of fiction and reality, this “C.C” is a real person, Cyril Connolly, who was indeed editor of Horizon in 1940. The letter, however, is an invention.

Throughout, the novel explores the power an author has over his or her readers.
The key protagonist in the novel is a writer. She is presented to us as such from the opening pages of the novel, when she has just completed her first play, The Trials of Arabella, to the closing pages, where she justifies her decision to rewrite the past.

Briony's texts are written with moral purposes in mind. McEwan alludes to Northanger Abbey.

Just as The Trials of Arabella was written with a moral purpose in mind - to persuade her brother, Leon, to settle down and marry – so the novel we are reading has a moral purpose – to atone for the “crime” Briony has committed against Robbie and Cecilia.
To fulfil this aim, Briony, like “God”, brings Robbie and Cecilia back from the dead.

Another typical feature of postmodern novels is intertextuality – the interplay between the novel and other texts through allusions, parallels etc.
One of the most significant allusions is to Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey (1803).
The Tallis home to which Briony returns to in Part Four is now a hotel called Tilney’s, the name a direct reference to Henry Tilney, the heroine’s love interest in the novel, and the speaker of the lines which McEwan uses as the epigraph to his novel (“Dear Miss Morland…”).

These references to Northanger Abbey create different layers of irony.
The heroine of the novel, Catherine Morland (the “Miss Morland” to whom the words in McEwan’s epigraph are addressed) shares many similarities with Briony:
- Both of them are obsessed with fiction (Catherine Morland is an avid reader of gothic novels);
- Both of them let their imaginations run away with them, concocting sensational stories from the world around themselves and casting innocent men as villains.

But Henry Tilney’s words in the epigraph also contain a darker irony.
He admonishes Miss Morland by reminding her that “we are English… we are Christians” and refers to the importance of “our laws” in English society.
However, McEwan’s novel will expose the darkness and corruption which lie beneath the respectable façade of 1930s upper-middle-class society and show how class prejudice can unduly influence our legal system, with the innocent punished and the guilty left scot free.