Atonement and the Failure of the General Point of View

Jett McAlister Narrative POV Seminar 2 March 2004 Atonement and the Failure of the General Point of View Atonement’s chief narrative feature is McEwan’s use of an embedded author—Briony Tallis—whose text is nearly coterminous with the novel itself. This technique is of course not a new one: Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling are both framed as the written accounts of their protagonists. McEwan’s trick in Atonement, though, is presumably that we are to be ignorant of the presence of this embedded author until very close to the end of the book. The chief effect of this is that we are forced to retroactively reconsider our epistemological position vis-à  -vis the novel’s characters and its events, a†¦show more content†¦If we compare the epistemological position of an omniscient God to that of a person, we can suggest that God can see things from a point of view that supercedes even the general point of view: God has an â€Å"absolute† point of view in which all points of view can be se en through and judged for their accuracy or completion; the individual’s point of view is limited and escapable only through imaginative sympathy. Briony-as-God, however, lacks this absolute point of view; as an author, she imagines her characters points of view without instantiating them. Chapters focalized on Cecilia or Robbie show us not their points of view, but Briony’s imagination of them. But because she is haunted by her own epistemological limits—as well as her â€Å"feeling† that she is more â€Å"real† than other people—her imaginative creation fails to allow her to enter other points of view; she cannot, that is, be â€Å"at one† with her characters. The distance between Briony and her characters, her inability to be â€Å"at one† with them, through the experience of either a general or an absolute point of view, makes atonement (â€Å"at-one-ment†) impossible. Questions 1. My point that, on a first reading of Atonement, we are â€Å"supposed† to experience different focalizations as reliable rests on the idea that McEwan, in writing the novel, attempted to keep Briony’s status as author from us. But is this the case? To what degreeShow MoreRelatedTypes Of Christian Ethics By H.richard Niebuhr1677 Words   |  7 Pagesjustice, and offer their own perspectives on the common topic. I. Types of Christian Ethics by H.Richard Niebuhr 1. 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