Layers of Deception in Ian McEwan’s Atonement: A Dialogue

In this joint paper, we propose to analyze from two different perspectives the pivotal role of the last part of Atonement, “London, 1999,” and its effect on our understanding of the novel, as well as the authorial motives for orchestrating such a late narrative upheaval. We will show that this narrative reconfiguration forces the readers to reassess their interpretations of the interplay between truth, error, and deception, and to ponder the respective functions of omniscience and interlocution (i.e., Briony’s resorting to the imagined words of others to speak through them, to externalize and thus voice out, in these alternative fantasized narratives, her own repressed voice) in the reception process. In light of the coda, one realizes that Briony herself was the character-author, lying in ambush behind the frame narrator and composing the inner focalizations of the different characters. It thus becomes clear that interlocution, manipulative though it proves to be, is a way to accommodate, within Briony’s novel, dialogic spaces of inner contradiction, and crucially to literally voice out, through fantasized others and indirect subjectivation, what she cannot bear to adjust to. But this realization also requires a consistent hermeneutical effort on the part of the readers who, depending on the nature of their expectations and emotional involvement in the narrative, may perceive “London, 1999” either as a playful gauntlet to be picked up—leading to an enhanced understanding of a complex narrator—or a major disruption of their reading experience. This article eventually presents two possible strategies of readjustment—of naturalization—in order to make sense of Atonement’s last chapter and, above all, its relation to the other parts of the novel.