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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Allusions
Explanation and Analysis—On the Beach:
At the end of the second part, the narrator describes the beach at Bray Dunes with a collection of similes and an allusions. After the dramatically depleting and seemingly endless trudge towards the coast, during which Robbie is barely able to remain conscious, this outburst of figurative language simulates his relief and hope at having made it to the Channel—but also his disorientation and struggle to make sense of everything around him.
The similes also show how the soldiers, traumatized and worn out, no longer move or behave as they did in the past. Instead, it makes more sense to abstract them to inanimate objects and features of nature or compare them to animals, foreigners, or fictional characters.
Robbie's first impression, upon arriving at Bray Dunes, is the "ten, twenty thousand" soldiers "spread across the vastness of the beach." The narrator uses a simile to capture Robbie's perspective: "In the distance they were like grains of black sand." As he looks at the men who have dug themselves holes "from which they peeped out, proprietorial and smug," Robbie thinks to himself that they're "like marmots." The "majority of the army," however, are more "like citizens of an Italian town [...]."
Robbie and the corporals end up in a bar, where a group of soldiers gangs up violently on an RAF clerk. Again, McEwan uses similes to describe the soldiers' behavior and movements. The narrator compares the pilot to "a mole in bright light." And when Corporal Mace hatches a plan to save the man, he makes a roar "like the bellowing of a speared bull." He also yodels "like Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan." This is an allusion to the film adaptation of Tarzan, in which the Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller played the titular hero. When the crowd of soldiers runs out of the bar, the crowd explodes through the doors "like champagne." As Robbie and Corporal Nettle move on from the experience at the bar, Robbie feels as though they are emerging from a dream.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Fountain:
In the novel's first part, the Triton fountain—an allusion to Bernini's Fontana del Tritone in Rome—consistently exists in the background. McEwan uses personification and simile to develop the fountain motif, imbuing it with an ambiguous presence.
In the first part, the narrator regularly mentions the fountain in descriptions of the estate and characters' movements around it. As a result, the fountain witnesses both the everyday monotony of the Tallises' lives and the confused chaos that leads to the novel's climax. Initially, it symbolizes the family's aspiration for continuity and wholeness. In the third part, however, it becomes apparent that the fountain is easily broken—and moreover that its destruction doesn't matter much to anyone.
It is telling that the Tallis family chooses to have a replica of a 17th-century Roman statue in their yard. Depicting a Greek sea god frequently alluded to in both classical and modern literature, the fountain is a way for them to emphasize their worldliness and culture. However, the first detailed description of the fountain reveals that the sculpture of Triton, though muscular, emanates neither power nor culture.
The muscular figure, squatting so comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a jet only two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back over his head, down his stone locks and along the groove of his powerful spine, leaving a glistening dark green stain.
In this passage, McEwan's personification serves to mock Triton. Despite its classical allure, the fountain is relatively pathetic. The low water pressure prevents the fountain from doing its job, which makes Triton seem feeble. Rather than a rushing flow of water, the main effect of the fountain is a stain. However, despite failing to exude power, it is still a nice addition to the estate—the narrator writes that Triton and his dolphins are "beautiful in the morning sunlight."
The narrator suggests that Cecilia, who otherwise seems bothered by her familiar surroundings, likes the fountain:
As she stepped out into the brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes over the fountain.
The simile, comparing the smell of the fountain to a hug, indicates that the Tallises take pleasure in the fountain. Although it is somewhat dysfunctional, there is nevertheless something reliable to the fountain's continued presence—much like the Tallis family itself.
Many years later, however, it turns out that the fountain was not only fragile but also unimportant. In the third part, Emily tells Briony about the destruction of the fountain in a letter.
The oldest of the children, a thirteen-year-old boy who looked no bigger than eight, had got into the fountain, climbed onto the statue and snapped off the Triton’s horn and his arm, right down to the elbow.
During the war, the Tallises host a number of evacuees from London in their home. As Emily explains in her letter, one of the children of the evacuated mothers breaks off Triton's arm. Although Jack believes that the fountain can be fixed, the part goes missing. Nothing more comes of the situation.
In the same letter, Emily reveals that Betty accidentally shattered Uncle Clem's Vase. The destruction of the fountain and the vase, both symbols of the Tallis family, reveal the emptiness of the family's apparent wholeness and continuity. Within a few short years, after the children have grown up, the members of the family are splintered and estranged in various ways. Alongside this, things that mattered a lot to them collectively come to lose their significance.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Robbie's Books:
In the eighth chapter, McEwan's characterization of Robbie goes hand in hand with descriptions of his book collection. This chapter, the first to focus on Robbie's perspective, is full of allusions that give the reader a sense of the literary touchpoints that shape the character's self-perception. Over the course of the novel, Robbie's reigning stance on literature fluctuates. At times, he's content with literature's ability to uncover the truth. In other instances, he finds it insufficient for making sense of life as it really is—a view that makes him want to depart from literature and instead study medicine.
At the opening of the first novel, Robbie has just graduated from Cambridge, where he studied English and achieved top marks. His desk is still crammed with "the folders and exercise books from the last months of his preparations for finals." Even if he has "no further use for his notes," he can't get himself to throw them out because "too much work, too much success was bound up with them." Before any specific literary allusions, the reader already understands from Robbie's desk that he is bright and ambitious.
As the narrator describes the character's room, the reader's impression of Robbie's intellect is strengthened. The first books that the narrator mentions are Auden's Poems and Housman's A Shropshire Lad. Both of these are works one could expect on the English curriculum of a university like Cambridge. These books lie side by side with books that were clearly not assigned to Robbie in literature courses, but that he has found himself, out of his own personal interest. One example is "practical handbooks on landscape gardening." Another is Gray's Anatomy, which Robbie is studying because he plans to apply to medical school.
The literary traces across Robbie's desk also show that he engages with the world of literature as more than just a reader. He is also a writer: "Ten typed-up poems lay beneath a printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialed by Mr. Eliot himself." Additionally, a photo of the cast from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night tells the reader that he also did theater at Cambridge.
The collection of Robbie's books and literary touchpoints come together to paint a picture of him as a person. In the third part, when Briony goes to visit Cecilia, several of these titles and authors—including Gray’s Anatomy and Housman—appear in a pile of books on the table.
As Robbie reflects on Cecilia and his feelings for her in the eighth chapter, he alludes to various literary figures to consider how they would describe his situation:
How had it crept up on him, this advanced stage of fetishizing the love object? Surely Freud had something to say about that in Three Essays on Sexuality. And so did Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, and all the rest, and it was in The Romaunt of the Rose.
This mixture of allusions give insight into the wide range of works and writers Robbie has studied. It also emphasizes the intellectual and emotional confusion of being in love.
In later chapters, Robbie continues to draw on literature to make sense of difficult situations and his emotions. His experiences during the war makes him disillusioned by literature. At the end of the second part, traumatized and desperately worn out, the narrator poses the following rhetorical question on Robbie's behalf: "But what did the poets know about survival?"
Related Themes:
Part 3
Explanation and Analysis—Fountain:
In the novel's first part, the Triton fountain—an allusion to Bernini's Fontana del Tritone in Rome—consistently exists in the background. McEwan uses personification and simile to develop the fountain motif, imbuing it with an ambiguous presence.
In the first part, the narrator regularly mentions the fountain in descriptions of the estate and characters' movements around it. As a result, the fountain witnesses both the everyday monotony of the Tallises' lives and the confused chaos that leads to the novel's climax. Initially, it symbolizes the family's aspiration for continuity and wholeness. In the third part, however, it becomes apparent that the fountain is easily broken—and moreover that its destruction doesn't matter much to anyone.
It is telling that the Tallis family chooses to have a replica of a 17th-century Roman statue in their yard. Depicting a Greek sea god frequently alluded to in both classical and modern literature, the fountain is a way for them to emphasize their worldliness and culture. However, the first detailed description of the fountain reveals that the sculpture of Triton, though muscular, emanates neither power nor culture.
The muscular figure, squatting so comfortably on his shell, could blow through his conch a jet only two inches high, the pressure was so feeble, and water fell back over his head, down his stone locks and along the groove of his powerful spine, leaving a glistening dark green stain.
In this passage, McEwan's personification serves to mock Triton. Despite its classical allure, the fountain is relatively pathetic. The low water pressure prevents the fountain from doing its job, which makes Triton seem feeble. Rather than a rushing flow of water, the main effect of the fountain is a stain. However, despite failing to exude power, it is still a nice addition to the estate—the narrator writes that Triton and his dolphins are "beautiful in the morning sunlight."
The narrator suggests that Cecilia, who otherwise seems bothered by her familiar surroundings, likes the fountain:
As she stepped out into the brightness, the rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes over the fountain.
The simile, comparing the smell of the fountain to a hug, indicates that the Tallises take pleasure in the fountain. Although it is somewhat dysfunctional, there is nevertheless something reliable to the fountain's continued presence—much like the Tallis family itself.
Many years later, however, it turns out that the fountain was not only fragile but also unimportant. In the third part, Emily tells Briony about the destruction of the fountain in a letter.
The oldest of the children, a thirteen-year-old boy who looked no bigger than eight, had got into the fountain, climbed onto the statue and snapped off the Triton’s horn and his arm, right down to the elbow.
During the war, the Tallises host a number of evacuees from London in their home. As Emily explains in her letter, one of the children of the evacuated mothers breaks off Triton's arm. Although Jack believes that the fountain can be fixed, the part goes missing. Nothing more comes of the situation.
In the same letter, Emily reveals that Betty accidentally shattered Uncle Clem's Vase. The destruction of the fountain and the vase, both symbols of the Tallis family, reveal the emptiness of the family's apparent wholeness and continuity. Within a few short years, after the children have grown up, the members of the family are splintered and estranged in various ways. Alongside this, things that mattered a lot to them collectively come to lose their significance.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Woolf and Modernism:
In line with the novel's postmodern features, there is a great degree of literary awareness embedded into the narrative of Atonement. Especially in the chapters from the perspective of Briony, who sees herself as a writer, the reader receives a number of reflections on storytelling, literary form, and narrative techniques. In the third part, McEwan uses simile and allusion to capture Briony's understanding of literary modernism.
Already as a 13-year-old, Briony is greatly preoccupied with literary conventions. In the first part, the narrator describes her dissatisfaction with the first story she ever wrote, at age 11. Briony is eager to grow up, which, for her, involves figuring out how to write a true story informed by a "vital knowingness about the ways of the world."
Briony's contempt for her first story in the first part comes to mind when the narrator describes her contempt for 19th-century literature in the third part. Thinking about the story she submitted to the literary magazine Horizon, Briony feels excited about its design: "the pure geometry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility." Just like in the first part, Briony believes that she has rooted out the naïveté of a past writing style: "The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of characters and plots." Referring to characters and plots as "quaint devices," "errors that modern psychology had exposed," and "rusted machinery," Briony believes she has figured out how to write "the novel of the future." After many years, the same outlook steers how Briony approaches writing. In her view, writing well comes down to rooting out traditional conventions and uncovering the true, modern conventions that will prove a worldly awareness.
McEwan uses a river simile to capture Briony's view of how a modernist writer conceives of the mind:
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it.
Briony has replaced her interest in devices like plot and character with this view of subjectivity. On the one hand, the passage presents an apt (not to mention poetic) description of stream-of-consciousness narration, which is associated with modernism. On the other hand, the reader gets the impression that Briony is oversimplifying the modernist form to a certain degree. She believes that a successful novel merely requires the writer to "enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on."
A few sentences later, McEwan presents the reader with an allusion:
She had read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves three times and thought that a great transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and that only fiction, a new kind of fiction, could capture the essence of the change.
It becomes evident that Briony—in her story, style, and view of literature—is merely modeling herself off of the notable modernist writer Virginia Woolf. Briony believes that reading The Waves three times has given her the authority and tools to expose the pretenses of the past and debunk its expired methods. The reader nevertheless gets the sense that this has a more strained effect than she realizes at the time. Rather than giving an impression of her authentic subjectivity, it comes off as pretense. This is confirmed by the rejection letter she receives from Horizon, in which the editor suggests that her story "owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf."
Related Themes:
