After dinner, during a late night search party for the Tallis’s twin cousins, Briony finds her cousin Lola laying on the ground, alone and afraid. 32, Gale, 2010, pp. So, she made the rash decision to blame Robbie for Lola’s rape, all because of the way she viewed the adult world.The next step in each character’s life differs. Jack Tallis took the first step in an enduring patronage by paying for the uniform and textbooks” (McEwan 82). Ian is confident now in his skills as a father as he expresses in a phone call with Reverend Emmett: “‘I know absolutely that you’ll be a good father…’‘I believe I will,’ Ian said.” (Tyler 334). Briony admits that ‘it is only in this last version that my lovers end well’, and that she has chosen this ending because she cannot see the purpose of telling a reader that ‘Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes’ or that ‘Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground Station’. Favorite Answer. . An example where this is illustrated is in Robbie and Cecilia’s dramatic scene at the fountain, where McEwan juxtaposes a stifled, “writhing”[1] account of events between the two with Briony’s imagined “proposal of marriage”[2] as she watches the same scene, interpreting it initially to be the “stuff of daily romance”[3]. From Robbie’s perspective, the library encounter is vastly different that what Briony observed. Cecilia witnesses the dire effects on Robbie of Jack’s classism and elitism, and thusly breaks ties with her father. It is a filter which gives Leo the ability to live up to his zodiac ideals, leading him to claim that ‘one felt another person, one was another person’. With this reading, it’s important to consider that if Desdemona saved Othello, Iago corrupted him. The noun ‘confused’ suggests that Rose is someone who is never able to impose her own will, be it because of her social status, the treatment of women in the pre-war society or the significance of Pinkie in her life. As she grows older, she starts to realize that she must atone for the terrible thing she has done. Another surprising aspect is revealed in the coda: the outcomes of Paul Marshall and his wife, Briony’s cousin, Lola. Ian ends up seeing the three children off into their own successful lives: “Thomas, Agatha, and Daphne have turned out well, and Ian claims that ‘You could never call it a penance to have to take care of these three. [5] Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 8.

… bodies are our gardens to which our / wills are gardeners”, (Act 1, scene 3, lines 361-63), Iago demonstrates the low value he places on morals and godliness, (‘Virtue? After Briony reads an X-rated letter meant for Cecelia from Robbie, she believes her sister is in immediate danger and that Robbie is some sort of psycho and talks to her cousin Lola about how she feels: “‘How appalling for you. [21] Ibid, 199. However Williams is more adept in controlling situations presented to her to suit her best interests. I might have this wrong…but I think she wants to recant. While Briony chastises her younger self, she still acknowledges that in placing herself as the author and giving herself the ‘absolute power of deciding outcomes’, she has complicated her attempt at empathy as she has become Godlike with that ‘absolute power’ and there is no one to forgive her but herself.
[2] Ibid, 38. Robbie is curious why it is only now that Marshall has mentioned the incident, but all of a sudden there is a commotion with everyone concerned with Lola’s injuries and Briony finding a letter on Jackson ’s empty chair. Through this, McEwan may have been criticizing the force that authorities, particularly patriarchal authority, has over others- such to the extent of compelling them to comply with their ideas. The political repercussions of the real-world event are present in the background leading up to the Perownes’ personal attack, but Henry does not appear to be strongly empathetic to foreign struggles.