Atonement

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In the novel Atonement, Ian Mcewan depicts a rape which remains ambiguous until the very end of the novel. The reader is not enlightened with details thus such spectacle remains vague. The lectors cannot help but feel curious at the fact that the rape – the event which caused all the chaos, is never given that much light and it is scantily looked into.
From the start of Atonement, one realizes that Paul Marshall is attracted to Briony’s cousin, Lola Quincy. In his eyes she is ‘almost a young woman, poised and imperious,quite the little Pre-Raphaelite princess’. Crucially the readers are never told what happens between her and Marshall in the playroom in the afternoon; the lecto constructs this from the ‘little squeal of laughter abruptly smothered’ overheard by Emily and the ‘two-inch scratch’ seen by Robbie by the time dinner starts. Presumably Lola enjoys the attention until Marshall goes too far and she fights him off. How the ‘rape’ scene comes about is a mystery, as is what is going on through Lola’s mind behind her equivocal utterances while she desperately constructs a way to ...

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