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Part 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Atonement, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Perspective
Guilt
Class
Lost Innocence
The Unchangeable Past
Stories and Literature
Summary
Analysis
Now speaking in first person in 1999, Briony tells of her decision to visit the Imperial War Museum library on her 77th birthday. Her family has sent a car to pick her up after lunch, and she has decided to pay her respects to the people who work at the archives, whom she has gotten to know over the years. She will be donating her extended written correspondence with “old Mr. Nettle.”
And yet that moderately hopeful end of the third section does not end the novel. Briony appears to have dedicated a lifetime to atoning for the wrongs wrought by her adolescent mistake by providing a true narrative of what happened. Yet there is unease hidden in this discovery, as why would she have had to talk with these third-party sources to get the details of what happened?
Themes
Briony has just received dismal medical news. She has vascular dementia, and will slowly and inevitably sink into incoherence over the next few years. Briony is surprisingly upbeat about the news. As her taxicab arrives at the museum, she sees a black Rolls-Royce parked outside, which evokes memories of the Marshalls. Paul and Lola are now high-ranking socialites, actively involved in charity. As Briony walks up the steps, the Marshalls descend past her, surrounded by a gaggle of handlers and officials. Paul, she sees, is physically diminished but dignified. Lola is in impressive shape.
The source of Briony’s acceptance of her irreversible mental decay is unclear. Is she content with the work she has done to atone for her wrongdoing? Has she come to terms with what happened? Or is she looking forward to escape her feelings of guilt? Regardless, Briony’s impending loss of faculties means the last person to know what happened no longer will know. The only way to preserve what happened is through writing.
Themes
As she ascends in the elevator to the archives, Briony reflects that while she may outlive Paul, Lola will very likely outlive her. This means that Briony will not be able to publish a book without being litigated. At the archives, Briony hands over Nettle’s letters from Dunkirk, and receives in return a list of historical corrections to her manuscript, made by a fastidious old colonel.
Themes
Back in her flat, Briony packs her belongings for an overnight trip. She glances at a photograph on her desk of her deceased husband Thierry, and realizes that she will someday be unable to recognize him. She calms her nerves by choosing an outfit for the birthday dinner that her family is throwing for her.
Themes
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A car comes to pick Briony up. She makes small talk with the driver and then falls asleep. When she awakes, she is in the countryside, approaching a place called Tilney’s Hotel, which used to be the Tallis estate. She was last here for her mother’s funeral, 25 years earlier. Briony gets her room keys and finds it uncanny to walk through her old home and see numbers and locks on all the bedroom doors.
Themes
Briony gets dressed in her hotel room and descends to the dining room. She is greeted by a large group of applauding relatives, very few of whom she recognizes. She sees Leon, who is doddering and wheelchair-bound, and greets Pierrot. She meets many generations of offspring, including the scions of Jackson, who died 15 years ago.
Themes
An announcement is made: there will be entertainment before dinner. Briony is guided to a front-row seat. Much to her surprise, the youngest Quincey children stand up and perform The Trials of Arabella. Briony is quickly reminded of herself as a “busy, priggish, conceited little girl.”
Themes
After dinner and drinks, Briony returns to her room and stays up into the morning at her writing desk. Her many drafts of a memoir have never resulted in a publication, because it would be considered libelous to the Marshalls, who are known to be very litigious. Until the subjects of the book are dead, she may not publish it.
Themes
Briony reflects on her previous drafts. She acknowledges that this most recent version gives a happier ending to the lovers Cecilia and Robbie. In reality, Robbie died of septicemia at Bray Dunes in June 1940, and Cecilia perished in the bombing of Balham Underground shortly thereafter. The visit to Cecilia’s after Lola’s wedding was a fabrication. This sad ending seems, to Briony, to be a disservice.
Themes
The problem Briony has pondered for her lifetime is how she may achieve atonement when she, the novelist, cannot appeal to a power higher than her own creative abilities. Her imagination is the only deity. This attempt for atonement, then, was impossible—but it is the attempt that matters. Briony sees her choice to let the lovers live in her novel as a “final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair…I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forget me.” Briony muses that it isn’t impossible to imagine Robbie and Cecilia alive and together, enjoying the recent performance of The Trials of Arabella. “But,” Briony remarks that instead of trying to conjure this image, “now I must sleep.”
