Examples Of Heroism In Atonement

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Heroism, Identification, and Manipulation Misreading and Atonement I. Introduction When one word is needed to summarize Atonement, “misreading”, which can briefly conclude the whole novel with Briony’s misreading of Robbie and readers’ misreading of the ending must be on the list. The story happened in Britain during the First and the Second World War, while Paul Marshall, a chocolate magnate, and the Tallis were on vacation in the countryside. The hero in the story, Robbie Turner, whose mother was a servant in the Tallis family, fell in love with the heroin, Cecilia Tallis. However, the outcome is upsetting and deceptive because of the misreading throughout the novel. This paper seeks to analyze three causes of misreading, including heroism, identification, and manipulation, and tries to explain …show more content…

Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin (McEwan 349). The novel started to write the process of Briony’s atonement after introducing the conditions at the military front and of the hospital during the Second World War. Briony realized the cruelty of the war and gave up the opportunity to Oxford. She chose to be a nurse and atoned for her guilt like Puritans. She understood that it was easy to hurt someone, but the scratches and bruises were long healed(McEwan 325). She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin (McEwan 349). She tried her best to prove Robbie’s innocence and the story naturally win a satisfying ending. However, the blurring line between realism and romanticism just presented here. The author said frankly and in an interrogative mood in the end of the novel: Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel (McEwan

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