Date Posted:12:08:45 05/01/08 Thu Author:Mimi Choi Subject: Re: influences In reply to:
jodee
's message, "influences" on 08:56:17 04/22/08 Tue
Apart from the literary influences (Austen's Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth Bowen, The Go-Between, Clarissa, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, etc.), the most interesting and perhaps most significant influences on how McEwan wrote Atonement were his parents. His mother died of vascular dementia, which Briony knows she is suffering from in the final section, and his father was a soldier in northern France. He gets a small cameo in the Dunkirk section (he is on a bicycle riding past Robbie).
McEwan discussed this particular scene in many interviews he gave while promoting Atonement, and in some of those interviews, he discusses in depth what was probably the genesis. His father always reminisced about his wartime experience, and towards the end of his life, McEwan decided to record and transcribe those memories so that his father could read and reflect on them further. After the transcription was completed, McEwan was disappointed to discover that his father had no interest in reading it; he just liked to talk about what he remembered. But the experience obviously had an effect on McEwan, especially after his father died (sometime in the 1990s).
In the final section of Atonement, Briony returns to the Imperial War Museum where she had spent much time reading letters and other war-related documents. Obviously, that's what McEwan himself did to familarize himself with first-hand accounts. So, Briony is not only McEwan's fictional creation, she is in an interesting way, McEwan himself. In one interview, he was asked how he could assume the perspective of an old woman, and he replied that he imagined himself putting on a coat that belonged to a 70-year-old woman. In a similar way, Briony does that as well with Cecilia and Robbie.
