Atonement: Motifs 10 key examples

The arrival of the cousins sparks Briony's reflections on her age and maturity. When she interacts with Lola in the first chapters, Briony takes particular note of her own childishness. Lola dresses "in the guise of the adult she considered herself at heart to be." When they rehearse for the play, she does not reveal "any demonstration of ragged, childish enthusiasm." Although Briony can tell that Lola is consciously playing the role of the older cousin, it still impacts how she sees herself and her own maturity: "She thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to." Lola's behavior induces Briony to reflect on her age, knowledge, and access, which further shapes her perspective on the interaction that unfolds between Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain: "This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent."

The domino effect of Lola's teenage posturing has further consequences. Just before Robbie gives Briony the fateful letter, she symbolically purifies herself of childhood. As she slashes at nettles, Briony imagines that she's severing "the sickly dependency of infancy and early childhood, and the schoolgirl eager to show off and be praised, and the eleven-year-old's silly pride in her first stories and her reliance on her mother's good opinion." When Robbie gives her the letter right after this rite, she comes to identify it as an initiation. After reading the letter, she takes "the very complexity of her feelings" as confirmation that she "was entering an arena of adult emotion." She notes that "It was a chilly sensation, growing up," and realizes with some sorrow that she will "never sit on Emily's or Cecilia's lap again, or only as a joke."

Several of Briony's ensuing experiences confirm her conviction that she's grown up. For example, she views Robbie's hatred as "another entry": "to be the object of adult hatred was an initiation into a solemn new world." And in the legal process that unfolds after Briony frames Robbie, the experience of being "listened to, deferred to and gently prompted seemed at one with her new maturity." Ultimately, however, Briony comes to realize that she didn't grow up over the course of this single day. Rather, it's over the course of her many years of guilt and atonement that she leaves childhood behind. When Robbie asks her in the third part what made her change her mind, she tells him "[g]rowing up."

Throughout the first part, various characters reflect on Briony's awkward pubescent position. Robbie thinks to himself that she inhabits "an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds." Emily identifies Briony's "slow retraction, the retreat into autonomy" as a signal of "the approaching end of Briony's childhood." In the third part, the rejection letter echos this view of Briony: "We catch this young girl at the dawn of her selfhood."

Right away, the novel opens with a writer's reflections on writing. After providing a summary of The Trials of Arabella, the narrator proceeds to characterize Briony and her experiences as a writer. She wrote her first story at the age of 11. In Briony's perspective, it was "a foolish affair, imitative of half a dozen folktales and lacking, she realized later, that vital knowingness about ways of the world which compels a reader's respect." Briony remains fixated on proving knowingness throughout the novel. For her, storytelling is a way to show the adults in her life that she—despite her relative youth—is able to transform observation into concrete knowledge. Emily recognizes the connection her youngest daughter has forged between writing and growing up, and reflects on how Briony has "vanished into an intact inner world of which the writing was no more than the visible surface." For Briony, writing is "the protective crust" through which she encounters the world.

Over the course of the following chapters, the narrative is interspersed with characters' reflections on language, writing, and storytelling. Not everyone relates to Briony's initial identification of writing as a form of order or protection. When Robbie sits down to write his letter to Cecilia, for example, he struggles to find the right diction, syntax, and tone. His challenges of self-expression emphasize the insufficiency of language for capturing strong, complicated emotion. Briony herself finds words similarly insufficient when she attempts to articulate her observation of Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain: "Writing a story was a hopeless, puny enterprise." And when Cecilia and Robbie face each other in the library, they find that "there seemed no way out with words."

Briony believes in writing again within a few hours. When everyone goes outside to look for the twins in the 13th chapter, she experiences the night through the filter of how she she would convey it in a story, thinking to herself that "[t]here was nothing she could not describe." This sentence is repeated later in the same chapter, when she witnesses Lola's rape and already feels confident about the testimony she will give later on. In this chapter, Briony both conceives of writing as a form of imagination and as a way of establishing absolute fact. Giving the reader insight into Briony's thoughts, the narrator poses the question, "Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?" The narrator also describes Briony's thoughts in the following way: "Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her." 

As she grows up, Briony continues to make sense of the world and the truth through writing. When she works at the hospital, she keeps a journal that feels like "her true self." And in the epilogue, she expresses delight over the way the archive lets her make her story seem extra factual: "I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction."

In the first part, letters are exchanged less for the purpose of bridging geographical distances. Instead, they facilitate the communication of complicated sentiments. In the eighth chapter, Robbie writes Cecilia a letter because he doubts his ability to formulate his feelings in a face-to-face interaction. For him, writing a letter is a way to think aloud and avoid immediate confrontation. Several chapters later, the Quincey twins leave a letter on a chair in the dining room, in which they confess that they have run away. Their inability to communicate with the people around them is why they decide to run away in the first place.

Later in the novel, letter-writing becomes a necessity because of real, geographical distances. In the second part, Robbie and Cecilia send each other letters after his arrest and while he's a soldier. Their letters to and from the prison are subject to close, censorious scrutiny, prompting them to find creative ways to communicate their true sentiments under the radar. While Robbie fights in France, the material existence of Cecilia's letters keeps him from losing hope—merely the thought of the letters in his pocket fills his mind with her words. In the third part, letters are also central to Briony's wartime life. She receives letters from Emily about life at home as well as a letter from her father announcing Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall. Additionally, the long letter Briony receives from the literary magazine is embedded into the narrative. In the epilogue, as she describes the research she did for her book project, she mentions having corresponded with Corporal Nettle.

The novel's main conflict springs out of a letter that Robbie writes in the first part. It seems worth nothing, however, that these far-reaching consequences do not primarily come from what is written in the letter. The main problem is who winds up accessing it. If the letter had passed directly from Robbie to Cecilia, it may not have made much damage. However, because Briony reads the letter and shows it to the police, the potency of the letter snowballs so much that Robbie's written words play a part in his arrest. As soon as he hands off the envelope, Robbie loses control over his words and their reception.

In a scene at the end of the first part, McEwan illustrates the challenges of epistolary privacy. Cecilia is outraged to find that everyone in the drawing is passing around the letter she received from Robbie. She shouts “It belongs to me” and “You have absolutely no right!” as they block her from grabbing the letter. Practically speaking, even if the envelope has her name on it, Cecilia's proprietary right to the letter is flimsy. 

On the other hand, letters do not merely bring about chaos and conflict in the novel. McEwan also presents written communication as the basis of atonement and redemption. At the end of the third part, Cecilia and Robbie instruct Briony to write various letters in order to retract her evidence. In the hopeful final sentences of the novel, the mess that started with a letter ends with a letter as well: "She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement, and she was ready to begin."

Briony's preoccupation with language is informed by her self-image, given that she first and foremost sees herself as a writer. Early in the first chapter, the narrator captures her fascination with the world-building made possible by language: "falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance." In the third chapter, she feels awe to think that "You saw the word castle and it was there." Over the course of the novel, Briony learns that words can have much more dire consequences. They can inspire fear, they can turn people against their friends, and they can even convict innocent people. In the third part, she thinks about how "the words that had convicted [Robbie] had been her very own."

The novel's first forbidden word is "divorce," an "unthinkable obscenity" that the Quincey children fear. In the fifth chapter, Pierrot and Lola freeze when Jackson says that they can't go home because their parents are going through a divorce: "The word had never been used in front of the children, and never uttered by them." As the oldest of the siblings, Lola attempts to discipline the boys' language use: “You will never ever use that word again. D’you hear me?”

The novel's second, and much more significant, forbidden word appears in the vulgar letter draft that Robbie accidentally sends to Cecilia via Briony. As he struggles to articulate himself in the eighth chapter, he writes the following sentences on a whim: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”

As Cecilia reads the letter, she is struck by the "unit of meaning whose force and color was derived from the single repeated word." Similarly, Briony feels as though she has "seen an unspeakable word." Already, the actual word ("cunt") has been replaced by the label "word." This sets the standard for the way the narrator refers to the letter in the rest of the novel, evoking the shock that Briony and Cecilia felt when reading it. The letter is reduced to a single word, and the specific word is reduced to the general linguistic category to which it belongs. 

In the 10th chapter, McEwan uses personification and metaphor to represent Briony's distress and disgust. The word dances through her thoughts like "a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams." Just like the Quincey children know that their parents are going through a divorce despite the label never having been used in their presence, Briony has no doubt about what the word references, even if "she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print" and "no one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence." This is not only because of the context, but also because she feels that "the word was at one with its meaning, [...] almost onomatopoeic." This rich passage shows that Briony's preoccupation with individual words is not only informed by her writerly disposition, but also also by her intermediary position between childhood and adulthood. Her fear of the body and uncertainties regarding sex manifests itself as a fear of language itself. 

In the novel's first part, the narrator's descriptions of the windows—and the views they provide—underline the domestic comfort of the Tallis family. On the ground floor of the house, the French windows open up onto a large terrace. Upstairs, the windows offer extensive views of the estate's pastoral grounds. In the second and third parts, windows are neither as numerous nor accessible as in the first. During the war, windows in both France and London tend to be sandbagged or blacked out. The obscurity and unreachability of windows in these later parts contribute to the overwhelming sense of meaninglessness that accompanies the war.

In the first part, windows shed light on Briony's desire for knowledge about the world. She has a formative experience at the "nursery's wide-open windows" in the third chapter, as she watches an intimate scene unfold between Cecilia and Robbie. Aware that "only chance had brought her to the window" and that the scene is not about her, she accepts that she doesn't understand what she's witnessing and that she "must simply watch." 

Windows also represent characters' longing to be elsewhere. For instance, when Lola goes to stare out of the window in the first chapter, Briony wonders whether "Perhaps she herself was struggling with the temptation to flounce from the room." Throughout the first part, Cecilia struggles with this temptation to flounce. Desperately longing to escape the stifling familiarity of her childhood home, she frequently gazes and walks through the windows on the ground floor.

Windows come to be a thing of fantasy in the rest of the novel. Trudging through western France in the second part, Robbie comes across windows that are "sandbagged for machine-gun slits" or "heavily curtained." When he and Corporal Nettle make it to Bray-Dunes in the 15th chapter, Robbie imaginatively describes "the kind of place that he had in mind for dinner." The description is richly embellished, and "French windows open onto a wrought-iron balcony" are a central part of it. To dream himself away from the war, he imagines a pair of open windows.

In the third part, the windows at the hospital are also sandbagged and cemented. And when she leaves the hospital on her day off, the windows around her are murky or inaccessible. There is "no telling" what's being made behind the "high filthy windows" of a factory she walks by, and she eats breakfast at "a drab little place with smeared windows." When she attempts to form an impression of Cecilia's house from the threshold, the "frosted-glass windows" restrict her view of the rest of the rooms.

Windows occupy a central role in the confrontation scene between Briony and Robbie. When he asks her whether she has "any idea at all what it's like inside," she finds herself imagining "small high windows in a cliff face of brick" but ends up shaking her head faintly. As he grows increasingly upset, she moves to the other end of the room, "toward the window." Gazing out of it, she decides "that she would not turn from the window until she was spoken to."

The novel ends with Briony once again standing at a window in her childhood home, looking out at the same view. Fifty-nine years have passed, but she remains a lone observer at the end of the epilogue.

Briony's automatic disdain for her cousins' red hair and freckles remains with her throughout her life. Initially, she has a concrete reason for fixating on her cousins' appearances: The Trials of Arabella. Because the three Quincey children will form the bulk of the cast, Briony considers how their features correspond with the way she had imagined the play's characters to look. The fact that all three are "ginger-haired and freckled" becomes an unresolvable problem that consumes her thoughts: "Her cousins’ coloring was too vivid—virtually fluorescent!—to be concealed." She wonders how to "tell them that Arabella was not a freckled person."

Ultimately, it's clear that a large portion of this problem revolves around Briony's childish desire to play Arabella herself. It's less that Lola's appearance is wrong for the character and more that Briony's appearance is right: "Her skin was pale and her hair was black and her thoughts were Briony’s thoughts." Over the course of the first part, Briony is vexed by her powerlessness over Lola's assumption of the role and, by extension, by Lola's appearance.

Later in the first part, she consoles herself with the knowledge that "[a]t least she had no freckles to conceal or soften, and that surely saved labor." Much later in the novel and many years later, in the third part, the narrator reveals that Briony hasn't let go of her negative associations with red hair and freckles. When she meets Fiona, who later becomes her closest friend at the hospital, her red hair and freckles make Briony "automatically wary." 

In the first part, the Quincey children's features give rise to another problem for the Tallis family. Because the twins "could not be told apart by a stranger," the family members have to put active effort into distinguishing them. The intentional effort they have to put into knowing the children's faces and names represents the Tallis family's difficulty with welcoming the Quincey children into their home.

It should be noted that Briony is able to tell the twins apart. The narrator shares the key she goes by:

It had been explained at lunch that the twins were to be distinguished by the fact that Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left earlobe on account of a dog he had tormented when he was three.

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In the ninth chapter, the narrator shows that Cecilia is also, after some effort, able to distinguish the twins: "She [...] gently turned the whole body so she could see the left ear."

Emily, the person whose recognition of the boys is arguably the most crucial, cannot tell the twins apart. The narrator confesses this on her behalf in the sixth chapter.

[...] and worse, they had diluted their identities, for she had never found this missing triangle of flesh. One could only know them generally.

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In this passage, it becomes clear that Emily's unwillingness to fully embrace her nephews and niece is informed by a long-standing conflict between herself and her sister Hermione. The reader is left with the impression that the triangle isn't missing but rather that she hasn't looked hard enough for it, because the boys "were not her own."

Although Cecilia is not yet introduced by name, this instance of juxtaposition is the first time she's mentioned in the narrative. The imagery of the big sister's cluttered room, a metaphorical stew, is the complete opposite of Briony's metaphorical shrine. Nevertheless, the reader's first impression of the younger sister is not necessarily more favorable than that of the older, as the diction of "possessed" and "demon" make Briony's preference for order seem overzealous. In fact, the imagery of the miniature animals all lined up perfectly can almost feel disturbing. This uneasy impression extends to the description of Briony's dollhouse, where the dolls are positioned as though they were "a citizen’s army awaiting orders." The narrator goes on to connect Briony's love of order to a lack of secrets: "Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing." This will become important, as Cecilia's more chaotic tendencies come to be associated with her rich and complicated inner life. It also foreshadows Briony's looming wrongdoing.

In the second chapter, the narrator focuses on Cecilia, confirming the impression the reader has already formed: "Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke." It appears that Cecilia is fully aware of her mess but doesn't mind it. What bothers her is familiarity; she longs to escape the comfortable order of her home life. As she stands by the fountain, for example, the view down the drive gives "an impression of timeless, unchanging calm which made her more certain than ever that she must soon be moving on." And later in the first part, when she helps the twins get dressed for dinner, a vague resolution enters her thoughts: "she had to get away." In this chapter, order and familiarity take on a negative connotation. Cecilia feels confined and stifled by the harmony of the Tallis household.

Order and disorder continue to play a central role in the novel, especially in Robbie's experiences from the war and Briony's experiences at the hospital. Moreover, McEwan suggests that Briony's penchant for order is her reason for writing, as storytelling is a way for her to create order in a tumultuous world. In fact, the novel ends with an elderly Briony instilling order in her life, as she prepares for sickness, memory loss, death and the end of her story.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

This scene gives the reader insight into the relationship between the two sisters. Until this point, they have seemed too different—too stuck in their own separate worlds—to be close. In this flashback, however, the narrator underlines that their relationship is built on intimacy and care.

In the seventh chapter, the reader sees this flashback from Briony's perspective. Reflecting on her propensity to get stuck in daydreams, she thinks about how it is "difficult to come back." This invokes the following flashback: "Come back, her sister used to whisper when she woke her from a bad dream." When Briony was little, Cecilia's care softened the return from reverie, which today feels harsh and lonely. By way of these interconnected flashbacks, the narrator suggests that Briony longs for the comfort she used to receive as a child. Throughout the first part, Briony feels caught between this longing and the desire to assert her maturity and independence.

As the novel proceeds, the reader discovers that the "come back" formulation is not limited to Cecilia's relationship with her younger sister. In the second part, Robbie recalls Cecilia's parting words, just before the police took him away. As he feels dragged down by the trauma of war, his main source of hope is his memory of the promise and request that Cecilia gave him in this final moment: "I’ll wait for you. Come back. There was a chance, just a chance, of getting back."

Later in the same chapter, he thinks about one of her letters, in which she repeats the powerful formulation:

"I’ll wait for you. Come back." She was quoting herself. She knew he would remember. From that time on, this was how she ended every one of her letters to Robbie in France.

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This marks the beginning of a sort of ritual for Cecilia and Robbie—she never bids him farewell without telling him to come back. Having found a new object of loyalty and love, Cecilia gives "come back" a new meaning. She no longer uses the formulation to bring about a metaphysical return for her sister, but to encourage a concrete return for Robbie. 

In the third part, Cecilia uses the "come back" formulation in yet a new situation. Seeking to calm Robbie down in the confrontation between him and Briony, she pulls him close, kisses him, and "with a tenderness that Briony remembered from years ago," tells him “Come back … Robbie, come back.” Once again, Cecilia seeks to bring about a more metaphysical return, coaxing Robbie out of his memories and trauma. When witnessing the appropriation of her childhood's utmost comfort, Briony understands that Cecilia has entered a new form of intimacy that she will never be a part of.

Briony's automatic disdain for her cousins' red hair and freckles remains with her throughout her life. Initially, she has a concrete reason for fixating on her cousins' appearances: The Trials of Arabella. Because the three Quincey children will form the bulk of the cast, Briony considers how their features correspond with the way she had imagined the play's characters to look. The fact that all three are "ginger-haired and freckled" becomes an unresolvable problem that consumes her thoughts: "Her cousins’ coloring was too vivid—virtually fluorescent!—to be concealed." She wonders how to "tell them that Arabella was not a freckled person."

Ultimately, it's clear that a large portion of this problem revolves around Briony's childish desire to play Arabella herself. It's less that Lola's appearance is wrong for the character and more that Briony's appearance is right: "Her skin was pale and her hair was black and her thoughts were Briony’s thoughts." Over the course of the first part, Briony is vexed by her powerlessness over Lola's assumption of the role and, by extension, by Lola's appearance.

Later in the first part, she consoles herself with the knowledge that "[a]t least she had no freckles to conceal or soften, and that surely saved labor." Much later in the novel and many years later, in the third part, the narrator reveals that Briony hasn't let go of her negative associations with red hair and freckles. When she meets Fiona, who later becomes her closest friend at the hospital, her red hair and freckles make Briony "automatically wary." 

In the first part, the Quincey children's features give rise to another problem for the Tallis family. Because the twins "could not be told apart by a stranger," the family members have to put active effort into distinguishing them. The intentional effort they have to put into knowing the children's faces and names represents the Tallis family's difficulty with welcoming the Quincey children into their home.

It should be noted that Briony is able to tell the twins apart. The narrator shares the key she goes by:

It had been explained at lunch that the twins were to be distinguished by the fact that Pierrot was missing a triangle of flesh from his left earlobe on account of a dog he had tormented when he was three.

Cite this Quote

In the ninth chapter, the narrator shows that Cecilia is also, after some effort, able to distinguish the twins: "She [...] gently turned the whole body so she could see the left ear."

Emily, the person whose recognition of the boys is arguably the most crucial, cannot tell the twins apart. The narrator confesses this on her behalf in the sixth chapter.

[...] and worse, they had diluted their identities, for she had never found this missing triangle of flesh. One could only know them generally.

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In this passage, it becomes clear that Emily's unwillingness to fully embrace her nephews and niece is informed by a long-standing conflict between herself and her sister Hermione. The reader is left with the impression that the triangle isn't missing but rather that she hasn't looked hard enough for it, because the boys "were not her own."

Early on, the reader gets the sense that Jack is often gone. He spends most of his time in the Whitehall neighborhood of London, where the British ministry of defense is located. The escalation of war seems to justify his absence: "Two years ago her father disappeared into the preparation of mysterious consultation documents for the Home Office." At the same time, the reader has an inkling that he uses his work to escape Emily and family obligations. Cecilia is of this opinion, which she sums up in a letter to Robbie in the second part: "My father preferred to lose himself in his work."

As Cecilia envisions the evening ahead in the first part, she predicts that they will receive "a phone call from the department to say that Mr. Tallis had to work late and would stay up in town." This is precisely what happens. By the time Leon arrives, the question he poses Cecilia seems rhetorical: “And the Old Man’s staying in town?” Briony appears to be more impacted by Jack's absence than her older siblings. In her experience, "the household [settles] around a fixed point" when Jack is home. Given that "his presence [imposes] order and [allows] freedom," Briony feels more directionless when he's away. During the dinner scene in the 11th chapter, McEwan illustrates the vacuum that results from Jack's absence. They drink the wrong wine and no one takes charge of the conversation.  

Ernest is first introduced in the eighth chapter, as the narrator describes the photographs on Robbie's desk. One of them is from his parents' honeymoon.

It looked as though Ernest’s mind was already elsewhere, already drifting seven summers ahead to the evening when he would walk away from his job as the Tallises’ gardener, away from the bungalow, without luggage, without even a farewell note on the kitchen table, leaving his wife and their six-year-old son to wonder about him for the rest of their lives.

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Ernest is even more absent than Jack—both from his family and from the narrative itself. As in Briony's experience, Robbie's lack of a father figure means lacking a fixed point to orient his self-understanding around. He's very aware of this. In the first part, he uses Freud to analyze his interest in landscape gardening as a way to "replace or surpass his absent father." In the second part, he recalls sitting on his father's shoulders and wishes he could have "those shoulders now." 

The absence of Jack and Ernest represents the immense loss that families went through during the wars of the 20th century. Part of why Jack seems to draw away from his family is the pain of losing his brother in WWI. Although Robbie doesn't know if Ernest became a soldier, his own participation in WWII makes him determined to find him: "He would track down his father, or his dead father’s story—either way, he would become his father’s son." As he walks through northwestern France, it strikes him that every man around him "had a father who remembered northern France, or was buried in it." He realizes that his want for a father makes him want to be a father.

This scene gives the reader insight into the relationship between the two sisters. Until this point, they have seemed too different—too stuck in their own separate worlds—to be close. In this flashback, however, the narrator underlines that their relationship is built on intimacy and care.

In the seventh chapter, the reader sees this flashback from Briony's perspective. Reflecting on her propensity to get stuck in daydreams, she thinks about how it is "difficult to come back." This invokes the following flashback: "Come back, her sister used to whisper when she woke her from a bad dream." When Briony was little, Cecilia's care softened the return from reverie, which today feels harsh and lonely. By way of these interconnected flashbacks, the narrator suggests that Briony longs for the comfort she used to receive as a child. Throughout the first part, Briony feels caught between this longing and the desire to assert her maturity and independence.

As the novel proceeds, the reader discovers that the "come back" formulation is not limited to Cecilia's relationship with her younger sister. In the second part, Robbie recalls Cecilia's parting words, just before the police took him away. As he feels dragged down by the trauma of war, his main source of hope is his memory of the promise and request that Cecilia gave him in this final moment: "I’ll wait for you. Come back. There was a chance, just a chance, of getting back."

Later in the same chapter, he thinks about one of her letters, in which she repeats the powerful formulation:

"I’ll wait for you. Come back." She was quoting herself. She knew he would remember. From that time on, this was how she ended every one of her letters to Robbie in France.

Cite this Quote

This marks the beginning of a sort of ritual for Cecilia and Robbie—she never bids him farewell without telling him to come back. Having found a new object of loyalty and love, Cecilia gives "come back" a new meaning. She no longer uses the formulation to bring about a metaphysical return for her sister, but to encourage a concrete return for Robbie. 

In the third part, Cecilia uses the "come back" formulation in yet a new situation. Seeking to calm Robbie down in the confrontation between him and Briony, she pulls him close, kisses him, and "with a tenderness that Briony remembered from years ago," tells him “Come back … Robbie, come back.” Once again, Cecilia seeks to bring about a more metaphysical return, coaxing Robbie out of his memories and trauma. When witnessing the appropriation of her childhood's utmost comfort, Briony understands that Cecilia has entered a new form of intimacy that she will never be a part of.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.