Chapter 3: Key Themes
English Lit: AQA A Level Atonement - Specification B, topic 2.3.2
Key Themes in Chapter 3
Events are focalized through Briony and she has written the narrative of Chapter 3.
Briony's narrative viewpoint
- Events are focalized through Briony.
- We see her frustrations with her cousins and, when the rehearsal breaks down, we follow Briony rather than Lola or the twins.
- We also witness how Briony reacts to the scene at the fountain below. Her initial certainty about what she has seen being is gradually shaken by her confusion around Cecilia’s actions.
Complexity of Briony's narrative
- The narrative we are reading is actually written by ‘Briony’.
- This adds a layer of complexity.
- The reader who may be unsure of how to respond to the narrative. A reader may feel sympathy for Briony while at the same time be perfectly aware that their emotional response is being manipulated by the narrative voice.
Flashback & authorial intrusion
- McEwan uses a form of flashback in Chapter 3 as we revisit the scene by the fountain but from a different point of view.
- There is another authorial intrusion when the narrative perspective shifts forward in time to a future Briony looking back at her 13-year-old self: “Six decades later she would describe how…” (p41).
Briony's self-reflection
- This older Briony (the ‘actual’ narrator of the events in Part One) reflects on how her vocation as a writer began at that moment.
- She admits to an awareness of “her self-mythologising”, recognising a tendency to distort the truth when drawing on personal experience for her fiction.
- The effect is again unsettling for a reader – how far can they ‘trust’ what they are reading?
Briony's epiphany
- The scene by the fountain sparks an epiphany (a moment of realisation) in Briony. She realises that a key task for a writer of mature fiction is to understand different psychologies and to present “different minds”.
- However, while this is a breakthrough for her as a writer, she is still too young to understand the complexity of adult behaviours and emotions.
Test yourself on Chapter 3: Key Themes
What does the older Briony admit she's aware of, in terms of her own writing, in Chapter 13?
What epiphany does Briony have in Chapter 3 in terms of her own writing?