Why Is Forgiveness Important In Ian Mcewan's Atonement?

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Paul Boose once said “forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” The future altering accusation, which disrupts the pasts of many, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement is based on innocence and incapacity. Starting at a young age, Briony Tallis writes throughout her life to atone for the false accusation she made in the past, shaping her future negatively and dismally. Briony Tallis, McEwan’s misguided protagonist, highlights the lifetime search for forgiveness using repetition, altering social economic statuses, and various storytelling techniques. When apologizing for a wrong doing, one often repeats words of sorrow and regret. Repetition, a commonly used technique in Atonement, begins with references to age. Thirteen year old Briony makes the accusation, old enough to know right from wrong. At thirteen, she has yet to come out to society and become a woman, so she spends her summer days with her younger cousins in the nursery, yet intrigued by adulthood. The hours preceding the formal dinner planned for the night of the accusation, “are charged with erotic tensions that the adolescent …show more content…

After Cecilia left the family house in protest, Briony reached out to her in many letters of apology and the want to see her. From these attempts of reconciliation, Cecilia describes Briony in a letter to Robbie as, “beginning to get the full grasp of what she did and what it has meant” (199). Due to this information, located in the second part and later deemed as fiction, readers can conclude that this again is for Briony’s sake of seeking forgiveness instead of actually receiving it from Cecilia and Robbie. This, in addition, describes why readers characterize Briony by “she wrecked the life of Cecilia and Robbie, but she is also the one in whose hearts they still live” (Thomsen). Meaning that by writing for forgiveness for many years, she has kept the couple

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