Briony Tallis, a young, naive girl with a vivid imagination and a need for control. Who, at the age of thirteen, falsely accused Robbie Turner of sexual assault which in end resulted in him going to prison. Robbie, having served most of that time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, having had his growing love for Cecelia stopped by involuntary absence, Robbie is sent to fight in World War II. Briony deprived Cecelia and Robbie of their love, in addition to denying Robbie of a bright future which he most certainly deserved. Due to Robbie and Cecelia’s early death and Lola and Paul Marshall’s engagement, Briony isn’t able to ever get the truth out which means she can no longer seek forgiveness. Her only alternative is to ‘atone’. The act of atoning a wrong doing, is not something that you do for another, but instead something you do for yourself. The question still remains is, did she succeed in achieving her ‘atonement’?
She chose to became a nurse over going to college to try redeem herself. She truly feels sorry for what she did and tried to do everything she could to atone by helping many injured and diseased men that have come back from war (Anchor Books, 2003). She endured the hardship of being a student nurse as reparation for the wrong she knew she had committed. Briony witnessed an extreme amount pain and injury which she felt was the right thing to do during the process of her ‘atonement’. She gave up a life at a prestigious university where she could’ve graduated and escaped the ‘horrors of war’, but she chose to become a nurse so she could atone for her past. Some people could say that her becoming a nurse doesn’t prove anything but I disagree. The best thing that she could do was to help other people and become a better person herself. She hasn’t changed when it comes to, her way being the only way and she struggled when there wasn’t order or control as in the book it said, “…at the first moment of pressure, she had failed.” (292) Which proves that when she is not in control of a situation, she isn’t able to cope and this tells readers that she still has aspects of her young, thirteen year old personality in her. Cecelia and Robbie both don’t recognize Briony’s apology, as said in the novel when Cecelia announce that she will never forgive her sister so Briony feels that by becoming a nurse will make up for all the pain she had caused by helping people who are in pain.
Briony also writes a novel to explain everything that had happened. In the novel, she says that Cecilia and Robbie had a happy ending but that is not the case. Robbie and Cecilia died during the war and don’t end up spending their lives together. Briony first wrote the real story but then she changed it and regarded the previous story as “pitiless”(370). This shows that she really cares about Robbie and Cecilia and wants them to have a happy life together. She writes the novel out of a need to find atonement, and writing the story was her search for it. But she herself admitted to the futility of the search when she asks, “how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that forgive her.” (371) Briony’s ultimate satisfaction with the novel implies she feels reconciled with herself through writing it – it was her search for atonement, which has been vital for her. The result of her search is just fiction as she gave Cecelia and Robbie a happy ending through her novel as she wasn’t able to give them that happiness in real life. We read so much about Briony’s search for ‘atonement’ and so little of the result of her search, that is perhaps the point of the book is her need for atonement and not whether she found it or not.
