Story In The Stories: The Famous Metafiction Novel "The Atonement"

The Atonement is a famous novel of Ian Russell McEwan. The Atonement has featured itself with the concentration of the realism, modernism and the post-modernism. This novel concerns the creation process itself and focused on the relationship between the reality and fictions, so it is also called as the “story in the stories”, which made this novel be the representative of the meta-fiction.

The 'Atonement' is a famous meta-fiction novel with the significant feature of meta-fiction and having the concept of the meta-fiction throughout the whole novel.

Briony Tallies, a 13-year-old British girl, is the fiction character in this novel. However, because of the successful application of meta-fiction, the readers have confused this fictional character with the real figure. In fact, the heroine of Miss Moran and citations of Brioni are similar in some respects: They are both obsessed with literature, indulged in the imagination among the Gothic novel, and cannot distinguish between the virtual world and the real world. Therefore, Brioni can be seen as the new Miss Moran himself by imagining she would like to see and imagine things become a reality.

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Atonement is not only inherited and applied the traditional literary forms, but show up the characteristics of the meta-fiction in a form of the self-conscious techniques. In the novel, an important characteristic of the meta-fiction has been vividly apparent - that is a strong sense of the stream of the self-consciousness.

The Briony in the story and the author of McEwan in the real life shared the similar thinking and creativity throughout the entire novel.

In his eyes, what the 'Atonement' has shown is not the crime of Briony itself, but how would her love of literature and a writer's ambition comprehend the evil. Therefore, he made the strong contrast of Briony’s inner repentance and her strong personal desires, to show that how would the human’s spirits will choose on the question of good and evil, and to show how humanity is struggling in the whirlpool of conscience and anxious feelings, leaving a rational insight into the hearts of meditation and the deep meaning which constituted the far-reaching implication charm of the fictional character. In the process of the realization of such a strong creation effects, the author allied the techniques of the meta-fiction, on the one hand to celebrate the creation of the imagination, on the other hand questioned the validity of reproduction with a strong sense of self-consciousness in terms of language, literature and fiction; unsure of the relationship between fiction and reality; parody, play, exaggeration, pretending natural style. When we specific such features of the meta-fiction to the creation of Atonement, we can see that this novel reflects the form of meta-narrative techniques from the three aspects: intertextuality, stories nested structure and the intentional disclosure of the fiction of stories.

Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she gave the readers a pitiless ending. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

It mainly concentrates on the psychological process of the heroine from 'criminal' to ' atonement ' from the several aspects of the narrative deconstruction, meta-fiction writing skills, as well as the discussion to the ethical issues appeared in the novel. it has focused on the protagonist's psychological process, and analyzed why it will make mistakes, and then how to realize their mistakes and how she eventually found the courage to bear the mistakes which have led to the unforgivable sins, and the reason that the author has designed a perfect ending for Robbie and Cecilia in the novel, to explore their self- salvation in the ultimate way.