Atonement -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 10:34:06 02/20/08 Wed
Author: Kiernan
Subject: Atonement

A modern novel/film which brings up many of the themes from Girard's work is Ian McEwan's "Atonement." In this text, a 13 year-old girl scapegoats a young man for a rape. Interestly enough, the beginning of the novel presents both the ambiguity of the charge and along with her justifications for it. Later on, we find out that she purposely charged him with the rape even though she knew that he hadn't committed it because she felt that he was upsetting her world. This is where McEwan gets even more interesting. In return for her sins against the young man (and her sister, his lover), she writes a story in which she, essentially, mythologizes them, making them out to be the perfect lovers. This is her "atonement" she says, her way of making right what she had done wrong. Yet the novel presents her with many other instances in which she could have retracted her testimony; she takes none of these and writes a story instead. Her mythological tale is presented as truth until the very end, where it is revealed that she is a novelist, beginning a descent into dementia, and that the "happy ending" of the young man and her sister was fiction, something she created. They both had died as victims of the Second World War. McEwan seems highly conscious of the art of fiction, here, and its power to sacralize. He demonstrates the futility of such mythologizing; the audience feels no satisfaction at the end, nor does the novelist seem to have fully atoned for her sins.

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