Structure and content (key points)

Structure and content (key points)

PART ONE

• Set on the long summer’s day in 1935 (Divided into 14 chapters; written in the realism tradition, often said in Jane Austen’s style)

• Aristotelian unity of time (one afternoon and evening) and place (a country house, pp. 23-24)

• The length of Part I allows for space to be given to observe and critique the landscape of a pre-war, upper-middle class England on a microscale:

o class differences between the servants, their families and the Tallises (pp. 34-35 Cecilia on Robbie when he took his shoes and socks off and went in barefoot; p. 48 Briony on class differences and leaping across boundaries);

o the snobbery imbued in the characterization of Emily and Leon in particular (Paul Marshall , the chocolate millionaire)

o The clenched relationship between the different family members: Cecilia and Emily (p.

25 Cecilia on Emily), Emily and Hermione (p. 10 Briony on how her mother criticizes Hermione; p. 84 Emily on Lola and Hermione; pp.

186-188 Emily soothing Lola), Jack and Emily (p. 189 Emily on Jack;

the superficial bliss) that symbolizes how the harmony between the Tallises is only superficial

o The theme of appearance vs. reality ( the Triton; Robbie, Lola; naming)

The triton is a poor imitation of Bernini’s fountain statue (p. 36)Seeming is not being: • Robbie Turner is a cleaning lady’s son who turns to be doing better at college than

Cecilia.• Lola: initially is portrayed as a poor child seeking refuge and safety in a “happy family”,

then turns out to be even more precocious than BrionyNaming:• Leon – lion• Cecilia – patroness saint of music; Cee• Briony – bright, brain or almost as “briny” – salty , (nosy, excessively curious, etc.)• Tallis – tall is• On changing the name (to present the family in a more advantageous way) (p. 139) • Jackson, Pierrot – almost as if they were fairy-tale characters (less classy, and ambitious)• Lola – like in “loll” – hang loosely, droop (her passivity, inability to speak up, express her

incertitude)

• Robbie – as in “rob”

o The barely disguised annoyance between the gathered family members and associates is introduced in the scene in the kitchen (p. 132, the

kitchen as a battlefield, where the characters argued) and culminates at the evening meal (pp. 159-161 on unease and discomfort associated with the heat wave and building-up

tension ). The unrest may be read as a figurative reference to the political climate of the period as well as a means for pointing out how dysfunctional this group is

o The prospect of the war hangs over them and is made more specific in Paul Marshall’s allusions to the profits he will make with his chocolate bars, an in Jack Tallis’s work for “Eventuality Planning” at the Home Office (p. 191 Emily on the Eventuality planning)

o This ominous view of the future is dismissed by Emily when she comes across horrifying figures that estimate the huge loss of life if war occurs (feminine passivity by evading problems, a laissez-faire attitude to the growing threat of fascism in mainland Europe)

• The atmosphere of developing tension (the heat wave is described as oppressive and cloying; Betty’s reaction embodies her frustrations with the temperature as well as with her employer; the pressure that is emphasized by the weather is also apparent in Emily’s thoughts as she ties to avoid having a migraine (Ch. 6, pp. 81-82))

• It is only in hindsight, after Briony’s revelation that this is her work, that the apparently distant 3rd person is seen to be crafted from her subjective perspective (the narrator’s trustworthiness is questionable; dangers of the literary imagination)

• It is a relatively slower-paced realist narrative that shifts from the point of view of one character to another and leads up to the moment when Robbie is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit (has the effect of slowly grinding towards Robbie’s arrest)

• Shifting perspectives – shifting nature of truth

PART TWO

• The lack of chapter divisions adds to the disorder of the situation being evoked and enhances the eventual chaos of Robbie’s thoughts

• The Dunkirk retreat• Lack of initial exposition; it is not until the

third page that “he” is finally introduced as Robbie Turner

• Robbie’s disorientation: “He had prized it from the fingers of a captain in the West Kents lying in a ditch outside – outside where?” (p. 243)

• Gradual breakdown of Robbie as he attempts to survive his wound in order to return home (on Robbie’s mind pp. 315-316)

• Robbie’s hallucinations, as the end of Part Two approaches, become more vivid and he is increasingly less coherent. Prior to this, his memories were distinct from the present, but as he comes closer to death his regrets overwhelm him (pp. 336-337 the present and the past intertwine)

PART THREE

• No chapter divisions• Briony’s training to be a nurse• The dying and the wounded are given their

role to condemn the violence of war• The adult Briony is given warmer aspects to

her character as she follows the orders of the formidable Sister Drummond

• By giving her this humanity, it becomes more likely that she at least might be attempting to atone for her sin.

LONDON, 1999

• The first-person narrator is used for the first time • May be interpreted as Briony’s asserting her

position of authority as she compares herself, as a novelist, to God

• This is also where the reader is given a more personal understanding of her as she explains her recent diagnosis of vascular dementia (pp. 456-457)

• By giving her a direct voice, this final part delineates how this is both her last chance for finding atonement (p. 462 on the sense of guilt) as well as introducing the most unreliable of narrators (p. 461-462 on Lola and Paul at the museum)

• The novel is completed with her return to the Tallis home, which is now a golf course and hotel (the story has come full circle, coming back to the same geographical location, though not quite the same – like Briony’s attempts to reconsider the past to atone for)

• Although it’s been altered considerably, the setting is used to frame the narrative

• The influence of the past on the present is also reiterated as some of the survivors from 1935 finally watch a performance of The Trial of Arabella.

KEY THEMES

The literary imagination• Dangers of the literary imagination (p. 200 B’s

imagination knows no limits)

• A playful and unsettling interpretation of how the fantasist, that is the writer, has the power to order lives (pp. 5-7 on B’s controlling demon, p. 94 on slashing at nettles)

• The narrative is threaded through with literary allusions, which add weight to the literariness (the use of intertextuality emphasizes the fictitious aspect of writing):

o Cecilia reads Clarissa, Richardson’s tale of rape and attempted amends (p.26)

o In a college production of Twelfth Night, Robbie pas played Malvolio, the man from below the stairs whose aspirations are cruelly thwarted (p. 105)

o The epigraph is taken from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, which is a “comedy of misplaced accusations that lead to shame (Peter Kemp)

Briony’s restricted perspective• She is caught between the two spheres of

childhood and adulthood: “The very complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (p. 144)

• The temptation to use the material she has stumbled across, and to later control what happens to her advantage, is revealed to be too great to resist.

• Her wish to leave fairy tales behind is evoked as an expression of her maturity, but this is confounded by her inability to see beyond the ordered binary view that is the mainstay of such fictions (she persists in seeing her sister as a heroine and Robbie as a villain in Part One) (p. 146)

• It is telling that after considering the letter threatened “the order of the household” she is inspired to write , but can only come up with the line “there was an old lady who swallowed a fly” (p. 147)

• This faltering between what she would like to write and what she is able to achieve symbolizes her childlike struggle to order her thoughts, and this is referred to again, but from Robbie’s perspective (p. 180): “At this stage in her life Briony inhabited and ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and re-crossed unpredictably”

• Her age, her ambition and her desire to control the others mean that contrary to her externalized outrage she is as much of a threat to the order of the household as she presumes Robbie to be

• In London , 1999 (p. 479):o Doubts about Briony’s authenticityo The ambivalence of the first-person narrativeo The novelist is seen as omnipotent; compared

to Godo An ethical warning of the dangers of control

and imagination o Briony may be claiming to attempt to atone for

her sin against Robbie, but she may also be accused of “colonizing” him for the sake of her writing

WAR• Chaos surrounding the Dunkirk retreat• Enhances the disparity between the then and

now of peace and war• The urgency of the tone emphasized the

situation of panic• Details of the care given to the injured and

dying add veracity, making the narrative believable (realism)

• The descriptions of the retreat implicitly criticize the self-enclosed bourgeois that fails to see the guilt of the privileged and wealthy as represented by Paul Marshall (p. 63)

• This theme encompasses wider conflicts such as class difference, as the intolerance of difference (The Tallises are so quick to assume Robbie is guilty of the crime)

GUILT, FORGIVENESS AND ATONEMENT

• Ambiguity : is she really trying to atone for the sin of lying? is she using the sovereignty of the author, which she aligns with God, to construct her ordered world? (p. 478)

• Why has she never told the truth after the first lie?: “She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf” (p.217)

• Her sense of guilt (p. 218; p. 221) is depicted as fluctuating and this destabilizes the simplistic binaries of guilt and innocence, forgiveness and blame, and fact and fiction

• Reparations for the debt of guilt (Melanie Klein) – Briony’s drive to unite them in fiction – away of making partial amends for her crime (p. 478)