Unreliable Narrative in Atonement
By
Zeng Jie
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Zhang Tingquan
Shanghai International Studies University
May 2010
Contents
Acknowledgements
摘要 ...........................................................................................................................................iii
Abstract......................................................................................................................................iv
Introduction ................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 A Brief Introduction to Rhetoric Narratology............................................................7
1.1The Development of Narratology...................................................................................7
1.2 Rhetoric Narratology .....................................................................................................9
1.2.1 Implied Author, Implied Reader, Narrator and Unreliable Narrator .................10
1.2.2 Experiencing Fiction: Judgment, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of
Narrative.....................................................................................................................13
Chapter 2 Reinterpretation of the Text Achieved by Unreliable Narration ..............................15
2.1 Interpretation of Briony’s Novel..................................................................................16
2.2 Reinterpretation of Briony’s Novel .............................................................................18
2.3 Ethical Positioning and Emotional Response of Readers............................................28
Chapter 3 The Unreliable Narrator Briony: Spokesperson for McEwan .................................31
3.1 Distance between Briony’s Story and the Truth ..........................................................31
3.2 Exploration on Topics of Novel Writing .....................................................................33
3.2.1 Truth and Imagination .......................................................................................34
3.2.2 Structure Going Out of Content.........................................................................34
3.2.3 What Has the Tradition Brought to Us? ............................................................35
3.2.4 Thoughts on Novel Writing in Briony’s Stream of Consciousness ...................36
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................38
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................40
Acknowledgements
As my thesis is finally completed, my heart is brimming with gratitude for those who
have assisted me with good counsel and encouragement in the past two years.
First and foremost, I am obliged to Zhang Tingquan, my supervisor, for all the time and
patience he has devoted to my thesis in the past few months. His suggestions and
encouragement strengthened my resolve and could always provide me with great confidence
whenever I was confronted with difficulty in the writing process.
My thanks also go to all the professors in Faulty of English Language and Culture whose
courses has ushered me into the charming temple of English literature as well as world
literature. I believe all this would have an indelible imprint on my life. I am very much
convinced that literature would continue to be a source of intellectual enjoyment for me after
my graduation.
Last but not least, I want to extend my thanks to my family and fellow classmates, who
have been offering me help and encouragement with sincerity whenever I ran into trouble.
Without their help, I would not have brought my thesis to its completion.
ii
摘要
伊恩·麦克尤恩是英国文坛当前最具影响力的作家之一。他擅长以细腻而又
冷静的文笔勾绘现代人内在的种种不安和恐惧，积极探讨诸多与人性相关的话题，
例如暴力、死亡、爱欲和善恶等。对各种叙事技巧的高超运用也成为近年来麦克
尤恩为人称道的重要原因之一。本论文试图从不可靠叙述这一角度入手，着力探
讨这一叙事手法如何促进了读者对小说的多层次解读。
论文通过使用芝加哥学派代表人物韦恩·布斯和詹姆斯·费伦关于修辞叙事
学的理论具体分析了《赎罪》中的不可靠叙述所引起的两个层面上的文本解读。
第一，不可靠叙述让读者对《赎罪》进行重新解读，进而影响读者的伦理判断。
阅读小说的前三部分时，读者跟随着故事中第三人称叙述者来阅读整个故事。了
解真相后，读者惊讶地发现故事中值得信赖的叙述者实际上是老年的布里奥妮。文
本中潜藏着主人公对幼时自己行为及心理的回顾与判断。在重新解读文本的过程
中，伦理判断影响了读者对主人公的态度。第二，不可靠叙述会引起一部分读者
对小说的创作过程进行思考。在小说结尾，读者发现小说前三部分中的一些对白
及场景只是主人公想象的产物。作为小说家的布里奥妮实际上可以看成麦克尤恩的
代言人，麦克尤恩通过布里奥妮以及她的小说或明或隐地表达了诸多关于小说创作的命
题。论文最后得出《赎罪》中的不可靠叙述引起的多层次文本解读使其成为了一部
意蕴丰富的杰作这一最后结论。
本文的创新点在于引入“不可靠叙述”这一概念探求《赎罪》的艺术价值形
成机制。
“不可靠叙述”这一概念的引入不仅能够帮助读者更充分地分析作品的“赎
罪”主题，还能将另一个主题联系起来。
关键词：不可靠叙述, 重新解读，伦理判断,小说创作
iii
Abstract
Ian McEwan is one of the most influential English writers in contemporary world.
He is famous for his minute yet detached depiction of the unease and fear lurking in the
mind of modern people. The themes he explores in his works, are most often concerned
with human nature like violence, death, good and evil. He is also famous for his
sophisticated manipulation of various writing techniques.My thesis tries to explore from
the perspective of unreliable narrative that how this technique makes multi-layered
interpretation of the novel possible.
My thesis interprets Atonement from two perspectives in light of the narratological
theory of two representatives of the Chicago School—Wayne Booth and James Phelan.
Firstly, the realization of unreliable narration in Atonement leads readers to reinterpret
the text and, consequently, affects their ethical judgments and emotions towards the
protagonist. While reading the first three parts of the novel, readers are guided by the
third-person narrator throughout the development of events. However, at the end of the
book they are taken aback by the fact that the unreliable narrator is actually the aged
Briony. The observation and judgment of the aged Briony on her childhood self is
embedded in the text. In the process of reinterpreting the story, there is a change in
readers’ attitude towards the protagonist. Secondly, unreliable narration may provoke
thoughts on novel writing in readers. After finishing reading the novel, readers get to
know that many dialogues and scenes in the first three parts are imagined by Briony. In
fact, Briony can be seen as the spokesperson for McEwan as a writer. By the use of the
character Briony and her novel, McEwan expresses, explicitly or implicitly, his views
on several topics concerning novel creation. The paper comes to a conclusion that the
multi-layered interpretation caused by unreliable narration makes Atonement a
masterpiece.
My thesis introduces the term of “unreliable narration” into text interpretation to
explore the artistic mechanism of Atonement. The term of “unreliable narration” can
not only help readers understand the theme of “atonement” more fully, but also prompt
readers to think about another theme the novel has tried to explore.
Key words: unreliable narration; text reinterpretation; ethical judgments; novel writing
iv
Introduction
Ian McEwan, born in 1948 in England, is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding
writers in the contemporary world. He has both enlarged the scope of subject matter and
enriched the writing style of literature. He is famous for his concise and elegant writing
style and in-depth exploration of the human condition. Ever since he published his first
collection of short story in 1975, he has finished altogether ten novels, two collections of
short stories and some works of other genres like children's fiction, plays, etc. Of all the
works he has written, his novels can best display his talent as a top writer. He received the
Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time.
His novel, Enduring Love, though not nominated for the Booker Prize, was extremely
popular with critics. After being nominated for the Booker Prize four times, he finally won
the award for his novel Amsterdam in 1998. For Amsterdam, he became the winner of
several other prizes: the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle
Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction(2003), and the Santiago Prize
for the European Novel (2004). His next novel, Atonement, was again nominated for the
Booker Prize for fiction and was widely regarded as the peak of his career. It became a
bestseller shortly after its publication and has received considerable acclaim both from
critics and readers. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel
Saturday and his most recent novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year
at the 2008 British Book Awards and was nominated for the 2007 Booker Prize.
McEwan starts his career as a short story writer. The publication of his first book First
Love, Last Rites, which won him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976, created a
sensation among readers at that time. The writer probes into the dark side of human heart
by dealing with themes of sex, death and obsession. In these stories, he expresses the point
of view of otherness by choosing people who are alienated from the mainstream society as
the characters of his stories. By depicting the living condition of these marginal people, he
affords us a private and intricate picture which has not been shed much light on so far. In
his novel writing, he held on to themes of darkness. His earliest novels, “The Cement
Garden” and “The Comfort of Strangers” in particular, gained him a nickname “Ian
1
Macabre”. After that, he switched to something less bitter, yet his concern for individual
lives remains and is to become the trademark of his following novels. He is repeatedly
praised for his sensitive treatment of individual lives and their living condition. Yu Hua,
Chinese writer of many a popular novels, once said that “the process of reading McEwan’s
short stories is just like moving your fingers on the edge of sharp knives and then finding
the cut remains permanently on your nerves and heart”(麦克尤恩的这些短篇小说犹如锋
利的刀片，阅读的过程就像是抚摸刀刃的过程，而且是用神经和情感去抚摸，然后发
现自己的神经和情感上留下了永久的划痕。)(余华，2008). He is one of the few writers
who could be both serious and popular at the same time. Of all his works, most of them
have turned out to be commercial success yet without been snubbed by literary critics.
Atonement was published in 2001 and is the eighth novel of Ian McEwan. Ever since
its publication, it has received many praises for its in-depth exploration of humanity as
well as its rich depository of writing techniques from prominent writers and critics both
home and abroad. As John Updike writes about Atonement on The New Yorker, “Ian
McEwan…has produced a beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.”(Updick, 2002: 80)
Besides, it has been favored with quite a few top literature awards, the WH Smith Literary
Award (2002), the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (2002), the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel
(2004). It was nominated for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. Although it didn’t earn the
prize at last, yet it is commonly considered to be the best novel of the writer.
Atonement follows the protagonist from early adolescence to old age as she revisits a
horrible mistake from her past, rectifies it and ultimately tries to atone for it.
The protagonist Briony, a girl with imagination at 13, misinterprets the romantic
relationship between her sister Cecilia and her lover Robbie. Her misidentification
of Robbie as a sex assaulter separates the couple for the next few year before they
reunite at the end of the story. Although the stain on his life can not be removed for
some reason, readers’ emotional expectation is partially satisfied. The end of the
novel brings us to London in the year of 1999. The younger Briony, now a very
famous novelist, reveals that the story we have read is actually written by her. She
tells us that Robbie and Cecelia didn’t reunite in the real life: Robbie died of
septicemia on the beaches of Dunkirk one day before the retreat, and Cecilia was killed
2
later in the same year by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains. All these years,
she has been trying to atone for her crime through writing, yet she fails. Now she realizes
that it is impossible for her to achieve atonement through writing because in the world she
creates she is the God who sets the limits and terms. In her last attempt of writing, she
makes up the ending, wanting her “spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince
survive to love” (McEwan, 2007: 371).
Popular with ordinary readers, Atonement has been equally favored by literary critics.
According to my research on this novel, this novel has been approached from the following
perspective.
It’s no surprise that critics will have a discussion on the fictionality of Atonement,
since definitely no reader can finish reading it without feeling the impact this way of
writing brings. Of all critical writings on this book, I think “Briony’s Stand against
Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement” by Brian Finney can be
singled out as a representative of this category. Brian Finney conducts an in-depth
discussion of all the fictional features the novel bears: “intertextuality”, “modulation of
prose
style”,
“variable
internal
focalization”,
“symmetrical
motifs”,
“narrative
anticipation” and other techniques (Finney, 2004: 68-82).
The personality of the protagonist Briony Tallis also attracts much attention from
reviewers. In “Briony’s Differentiation of Self-Reading Atonement from the Perspective of
Family Systems Theory”, Yan Chunmei tries to explore the working forces which have
shaped and finally changed the personality of Briony in light of the concept of
“self-differentiation” from Murray Bowen’s theory of family systems. She argues that
Briony’s inability to maintain a balance between her intellectual system and emotional
system (poor self-differentiation) is the main cause for her lie and the gradually achieved
balance between her intellect and emotion (good self-differentiation) as she grows explains
her attempt to atone for her past crime. She concludes a poorly differentiated child can
grow into an adult with good self-differentiation through diligence and a desire for family
connection.
In the process of reading this novel, sophisticated readers are sure to be overwhelmed
by a dazzling sense of familiarity and bewilderment. The manipulation of narration on the
part of the writer endlessly reminds them of past reading experience: Virginia Woolf’s The
3
Waves, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Henry James’The Golden Bowl, Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and L.P.
Hartley’s The Go-Between (Finney, 2004: 68-82). However, in “A Play within Play-Textual
Unstability in Atonement”, Jiang Nan draws a refreshing picture for us from the
perspective of internal intextuality. Jiang bases his research on the source theory of
intertextuality: French theorist Julia Kristeva’s transposition theory. In Jang’s point of view,
Julia Kristeva’s transposition theory applies well to the composition of Atonement.
Atonement develops with the successive completion of altogether four texts: The Trials of
Arabella, Two Figures by a Fountain, Briony’s Atonement and Ian McEwan’s Atonement
and the creation of each text is based on the transformation of the former one. Besides,
from 13 to 77, Briony constantly negates and transforms herself psychologically. The
conclusion is that the transposition both in textual and psychological level puts the novel
always in an unstable state and makes it open for interpretation.
There are also many introductory writings by Chinese scholars as well as some thesis
by foreign scholars, which put emphasis on Briony’s attempt to atone for her crime. In
“Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J.M.Coetzee, John Banville, and Ian
McEwan”, Elke D’Hoker first distinguish literary confession from religious confession. It
centers on the exploration of the mechanism underlying literary confession and religious
confession and goes further to explain the failure of Briony’s attempt to atone.
James Phelan’s studies Atonement from a different perspective in “Narrative
Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Phelan’s major theoretical claim is that
narrative judgment is central to a rhetorical understanding of narrative form, narrative
ethics, and narrative aesthetics. Phelan identifies three kinds of judgments (interpretive,
ethical, and aesthetic) and articulates six theses about their interrelation. Atonement
intertwines ethical judgments by its characters with reader’s ethical judgments of its
storytelling. It is concerned with the relation between transgression and atonement as it
shows, first, 13-year-old Briony Tallis’s well-meaning misidentification of her sister’s
lover as a sexual assailant and, second, Briony’s realization of her mistake and her efforts
to make amends, but after showing Briony on the verge of atonement, McEwan reveals
that he has encouraged a misidentification on his audience’s part: this novel we have been
reading is not only his but Briony’s. Furthermore, within the world of both their novels,
4
Briony’s error has been real but her atonement is pure fiction: her sister and her lover were
never reunited. Thus we need to come to terms both with the ethics of McEwan’s
misidentification of the narrative we have been reading. Phelan concludes that McEwan
guides us to see Briony’s justification as ethically and aesthetically deficient even as he
increase the aesthetic and ethical power of the novel by designing
his own
misidentification（Phelan, 2005: 322-366）.
Different from the perspective I have listed above, my thesis takes unreliable narrative
as a different perspective to interpret Atonement. By introducing unreliable narration and
other narratological terms, the dynamics of the interpretation process on the part of readers
is clearly presented. Besides, unreliable narration leads readers to look into another
implication of this novel—the making of fiction, which can be seen as another theme the
writer is willing to communicate with readers by writing Atonement. It is commonly agreed
that theory can be used to straighten out complicated phenomena. I think by introducing
unreliable narration, the interpretation process can be more clearly explained and readers’
attention can be easily led to the “unreliablity” of narrative, that is, fabrication in the
writing of Atonement.
My thesis is divided into three parts. The first chapter elaborates on the
narratological theory of two representatives of the Chicago School—Wayne Booth
and James Phelan. The second chapter, by the use of text analysis, focuses on the
text reinterpretation caused by unreliable narrative and the possible change in
ethical judgments and emotional response in readers. While reading the first three
parts of the novel, readers are guided by the third-person narrator throughout the
development of events. However, they are taken aback by the fact that the reliable
narrator is actually the aged Briony. The narration reflects her observation and
judgment on her childhood self. The third chapter is concerned with another
interpretation of the text. After finishing reading Atonement, readers are brought to a
hard fact that many dialogues and scenes in the first three parts are actually the
fruits of Briony’s imagination. This provokes readers to think about the relationship
between truth and imagination in novel creation. At last, they realize that Briony can
be seen as the spokesperson for McEwan as a writer. By the use of the character
Briony and her novel, McEwan expresses, explicitly or implicitly, several ideas
5
about novel writing. The paper comes to a conclusion that the multi-layered
interpretation caused by unreliable narration makes Atonement a masterpiece.
6
Chapter 1 A Brief Introduction to Rhetoric Narratology
1.1The Development of Narratology
Before the 20th century, traditional western literary critics always concentrate on the
themes, social functions, or moral significance in their study of fiction. The research on the
structures, forms and skills of fiction did not draw much attention from the researchers
before 1960s in the 20th century. As Tzvetan Todorov coined the French word narratologie
in Grammaire du Décaméron (1969), narratology became an independent discipline and
has experienced altogether two stages of development in the past few decades—classical
narratology and post-classical narratology.
As a matter of fact, the theoretical lineage of narratology can be dated back to as early
as Plato. In his book The Republic, he distinguished between mimesis and diegesis, which
mean imitation and narration respectively. By narration, “the poet is speaking in his own
person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else”, by imitation, the poet
produces an “assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture”
(Plato, 2002: 77-8). Later Aristotle expressed the same idea in his Poetics, “For the
medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in
which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own
person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us”
(Aristotle, 2004: 4).
Before narratology became an independent discipline, topics on both content and form
of fiction have already drawn the attention of novelists. A lot of questions which modern
narratology undertakes to deal with in fact have been touched upon by earlier novelists,
though maybe in a more restricted way.
There are two forces which jointly contribute to the rise of narratology among the
theorists in the 1960s. It is commonly agreed that modern narratology began with
Morphology of the Folk Tale by the Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp. In this book, Propp
extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the
Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements, or
morphemes. Propp used this method by analogy to analyze Russian fairy tales. By
7
breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative unites,
Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. Of the 100 fairy tales he
examined, he found out there were altogether 31 functions it performed and all the
characters fell into seven broad character types.
As the determinate force, structuralism pushes this thought of school forward.
Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field
as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure. But the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such
as anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. Ferdinand de
Saussure is the originator of the 20th century structuralism, and evidence of this can be
found in Course in General Linguistics, where he focused not on the use of language, but
rather on the underlying system of language. This approach focused on examining how the
elements of language related to each other in the present. In literary theory, structuralism
analyzes the narrative material by examining the underlying unchanging structure, which is
based on the linguistic sign system of Ferdinand de Saussure. The structuralism claims that
there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced
readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text. Hence, they say that everything
that is written seems to be governed by specific rules, a grammar of literature.
After narratology came into being in the 1960s, research on common laws of fiction,
narrative structure and skills became more and more popular. This school of narratology is
called classical narratology or structural narratology. The development of classical
narratology deepens people’s understanding of the structures, laws, expression forms and
aesthetical features of fiction. In interpretation of a particular text, classical narratology
usually separates the text from the reader and the social and historical context, putting
more emphasis on the objective description of a text. Structural theorists claim to base the
narrative analysis upon uniformly reproducible and wholly explicit methods of narrative
interpretation (Herman, 1999: 167).
Narratology revived in 1990s after being ignored by theorists for a short period of
time with the impact of de-constructivism. The academic development of narratology in
1990s was termed by David Herman as “Post Classical Narratology” (Herman, 1997:
1046-1059).
8
Post classical narratology theorists are divided into two groups according to the
objective of research: the poetics-oriented and the interpretation-oriented. The first group
aims to find out the common features of different narratives. Compared with classical
narratology, the focus of this group shifts: 1.from text to the interaction between text and
readers; 2.from literary narrative to narratives beyond literature, as Brian Richardson
concentrates on the mismatch between narrative time and narrative discourse, leading to
the inability to differentiate between story and discourse (Richardson, 2001: 168-175); 3.
from narratology to interdisciplinary narratology, 4. from synchronic to diachronic
narrative structure, concentrating on how the narrative structure is influenced by social and
historical context; 5. from narrative structure to the link between structure and ideology.
The second group sets the interpretation of specific texts as their aim. Acknowledging the
stability of narrative structure and the validity of narrative convention, it analyzes specific
texts by the use of the terms and concepts of classical narratology and, at the same time,
integrates the historical context, social context, and readers’ response with the text
interpretation and conducts interdisciplinary research, incorporating useful elements from
other school of thought to overcome its shortcomings.（申丹, 2005: 209-300）
Although there have been many heated debates on the relationship between classical
narratology and post-classical narratology, yet now an agreement has been reached that the
relationship between classical narratology and post
classical narratology is one of mutual
promotion and supplement rather than replacement. The narrative structure in classical
narratology can also be used in post classical narratology while classical narratology
provides technical support for post classical narratology criticism (申丹, 2005: 51-2).
1.2 Rhetoric Narratology
The relationship between classical narratology and post classical narratology is one of
mutual co-existence and supplement. Classical narratology pays its attention to the static
structure of narrative and the establishment of narrative poetics, but post classical
narratology has no unified research models. As post classical narratology tends to integrate
narratology with other disciplines, for example, feminism, rhetoric, and so on, various
branches of post-classical narratology have occurred. These branches have their own
9
research models and coexist with classical narratology in their own way.
Rhetorical narrative theory is one of the most important narratoligies in modern
America. It puts emphasis on how narratives influence readers and readers’ response to
narratives. In 1940s when literary criticism was dominated by New Critics, a group of
scholars led by the Chicago School (also called Neo-Aristotelianism) tried to restore the
tradition of rhetoric criticism originating from Aristotle, which valued the structure or form
of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Wayne C. Booth
and James Phelan are two important theories of the Chicago School.
1.2.1 Implied Author, Implied Reader, Narrator and Unreliable Narrator
Wayne C. Booth was one of the representatives of the Chicago School. We can never
emphasize the importance of his The Rhetoric of Fiction to the critical world too much.
Many of the terms and ideas from The Rhetoric of Fiction have become a normalized part
of the critical lexicon.
There have been many arguments about the existence of the real author’s intention in
the text before Wayne C. Booth advanced this new term in his The Rhetoric of Fiction. The
book can be seen as his critique of those mainstream critics. Distinct from traditional
biographical criticism, the new criticism argued that one can only talk about what the text
says, and the modern criticism argues for the eradication of authorial presence. Booth
claimed that it is impossible to talk about a text without talking about an author, because
the existence of the text implies the existence of an author, whether he intrudes directly in a
work. He also claimed that readers always draw conclusions about the beliefs and
judgments of a text's implied author, along the text's various lines of interest:
However impersonal he may try to be, his readers will inevitably construct a picture of the
official scribe who writes in this manner - and of course that official scribe will never be
neutral toward all values. Our reaction to his various commitments, secret or overt, will
help to determine our response to the work. (Booth, 1961: 71)
He uses the term “implied author” to distinguish the virtual author of the text from the
real author. He holds the virtual author is made to write a text by the real author without his
private bias. The distinction between the implied author and the real author lies in that the
10