Analysis Of Ian Mcewan's Atonement

Whole hearted originality is that of an oxymoron, simple because, “true originality” is not something that can be created. Yet originality is something that can be imitated and stolen from. The act of stealing is what generates “true originality.” Artists and every other creatively thinking person take from one another to make something revolutionizing. Take for consideration Ian McEwan, and his novel Atonement; the novel employs what would be a revolutionizing form of literary technique for British Literature. For the term “good artists copy, and great artists steal” (Pablo Picasso), resembles the true face of Ian McEwan due to his efforts of stealing literary techniques from other authors such as Virginia Woolf, and employing these old hashed

Yet stealing is something that all people do whether they know it or not. For reading works of literature from other writers, besides oneself, and then writing an essay later; the influence that that author has on one causes them to mimic their creativity mind. McEwan, despite receiving astonishing reviews for his novel Atonement, shows how artistic ability from human attributes mimic other literary novelists and artists. The author simply steals from authors like that of Virginia Woolf, who also steals from other writers like Marcel Proust. William Faulkner and James Joyce, along with Woolf, also steal from each other and their predecessors as well (Matus,

For within the novel, one experiences how Briony sees and feels her guilt toward Robby for her false accusations toward him. All throughout the book, this is present and this is what gives us the basis for which we can measure her “level” of atonement. Keeping this in mind, Virgina Woolf relies “heavily upon the interior monologue, adapted with modernist literary techniques, where she can explore the subjective realm of a character’s memories, thoughts and dreams” (Matus, 1), of her characters through the use of subjective narration. This indefinitely coincides with how McEwan develops his protagonist Briony, which, she comments on that she was the person who wrote the book and crafted all thoughts of her characters, Robbie, Cecilia and herself. A major example of this, is the interaction between the three of them in part 3, which was fictional because Briony was to cowardly to be able to go and confront her real atonement, yet instead, reflects back on it in her late 70’s.

In an artistic sense, by developing the plot of a book to be written around two main writers, the actual author McEwan and Briony, this creates a unique ideology for literary techniques. While a majority of the techniques for accomplishing this was composed through