Looking back on Atonement Last Chapter

After Robbie’s detail account of the war, Ian McEwan switches gears by re-introducing Briony. Instead of being the fantasy obsessed child who misperceives the world around her McEwan introduces Briony in a different light.

After Cecilia breaks her ties to her family and becomes a nurse Briony is left without a sister. Briony becomes a nurse instead of going to Cambridge. She experiences what it is like to be a trainee nurse. Later she comes in to contact with wounded soldiers. Briony meets Luc Cornet a French soldier. She is ordered to sit with him because he only speaks French and even though her school French she comforts him. When he asks her to loosen his bandages she realizes the fatal extent of his injuries (side of his head was missing). In his last moments of living he confuses her for a girl his mom wanted him to marry. He asks Briony if she loves him she hesitated yes because “No other reply was possible. Besides for the moment, she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die” (292). Briony comes head on with reality of death in the hospital. However, she has not out grown her love for fantasy because “she imagined the unavailable future…her sister –in-laws teasing her about her accent, and Luc Cornet loving her in his eager way”(293).

One day Briony decides to attend the wedding of her cousin Lola and Paul Marshall before finally visiting Cecilia. Now that she is wise and mature she wishes to atone her actions of wrongfully accusing Robbie Turner of raping her cousin Lola. When she arrives at Cecilia’s apartment she is determined to tell her that she knows Robbie is innocent and she will write a letter attesting to that. However, when she shows up to the apartment she does not expect to see Robbie. In the end they both refuse to forgive her. However she promises to begin the legal system.
Briony has written a novel about Cecilia and Robbie. Briony hopes to publish this book during her life time however; this does not seem to be a possibility due to the characters in the story. Briony states that she will only be able to publish the book if she changes the names of the characters which she refuses to do because she wants to stay as close to the truth as possible. This further shows that Briony has developed a conscience and a sense of reality during her younger years. She even states that she wishes she had written factual stories of the War when she was working in the hospital. Even in her twenties when she was a nurse, she changed names and details of her day to add entertainment. She adds that if the Lola and Paul Marshall were to die she would be able to publish the book. The Marshalls due to their fame are unwilling to be associated with the scandal described in Briony’s book. The scandal although true will ruin the Marshalls reputation.

In the end of the novel (set in 1999) Briony is seventy seven years old and she reveals that she wrote the novel. She also informs the reader that apart from Robbie and Cecilia’s thirty minute meeting, they never saw each other again and she never went to Cecilia’s apartment to make amends. Robbie died from septicemia and Cecilia was killed by a bomb. Through this book she wishes to give them the happiness they deserve she changes the ending of the book so that Robbie and Cecilia reunite and live out their lives in her novel. Towards the end she adds “I know there’s always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, but what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love,”(350).