Analysis Of Briony Tallis In Atonement

Briony Tallis is a character that has to have the world and its occupants in line with her wishes. By having these high expectations, she sets herself up for failure when people fail to live up to her assumptions of them. This causes her to give a bias and unreliable retelling of her life through the novel Atonement. The self-pity Briony generates for herself drives many of her relationships to breaking point and beyond, therefor she changes the characters, like herself, Cecilia and Robbie, to fit how she sees them not necessarily how they really were.

Briony is introduced to us as a thirteen-year-old girl, one that could be borderline obsessive compulsive drawing from her need to be tidy and control everything around her, including her environment

She is at first enthralled with the idea of writing plays because "a universe reduced to what was said in it was

He is also in his twenties and just back from his college education in Literature at Cambridge. He is the young man whom we follow into battle during World War Two in the middle sections of the book, as well as the character that is falsely accused of raping Lola Quincey by Briony Tallis. When he is falsely accused of Raping Briony’s cousin, he is abandoned by the Tallis family and is sent to prison for three years, in 1939 when Britain enters the war, Robbie has the option to emancipate himself by fighting in France as a soldier, this he does. As the novel continues it follows him throughout his tour in the front lines of Belgium to Dunkirk, where the rest of his army is to retreat back to England through the English Channel. He is, however injured from flying shrapnel and despite the vivid and blissful ending Briony gave him and Cecilia, died from his injuries before he could come home to England.

In her younger days Briony saw Robbie as a sex fiend, and not to be trusted. Though as she grew into adulthood, she understood and truly comprehended what she witnessed between Robbie and Cecilia, and in a way, grasps the severity of what her lies caused. Her way of making up for this was to construct an ending to the story in which Cecilia and Robbie do end up together, happy and healthy. Briony recognizes that she is not directly at fault for their deaths, but if it were not for her foolish false accusations then