I finally decided after much hesitation and doubt that I would write about my impressions of the beginning of the novel. It took me some time to agree to let myself be taken into the slow moving and dizzying inactivity of the day in the English countryside. It sometimes made my head hurt to read the tribulations of a 13 year old girl who because of a mixture of boredom, limitless imagination and naivete lives in an artificial reality that she writes because she craves both entertainment and fame.
I grew restless. I felt possessed by the same ill as the characters. I longed for anything to happen and prayed to be entertained by a little action myself.
I wondered what it was about these first eight chapters that made me dreamy and contemplative. I think perhaps it is because I felt compassion for their misery, amused by Briony's character as well as a blend of apprehension and tension from the gradual complication of the plot.
In these beginning chapters, the curtains open onto the stage. We are introduced into the world of Briony and it is almost as if we can enter her thoughts. She is so meticulously depicted that we come to know her intimately. She is described as orderly and precise, yet just as much as she exults in orderly proceedings and virtuous morals, she also exults and reaches her own emotional climaxes lost in excitement and drama. She is a playwright and this we are reminded of through the following seven chapters as more actors are being introduced onto the stage and the plot complicates.
Today as I was trying to find a theme to discuss on the blog, I realized that these first eight chapters reminded me in fact of a tragedy. Although the "Trials Of Arabella" is described as a drama, the intrigue that Briony writes for us is more like a tragedy.
"The heroes of ancient classical tragedy encounter situations in which, if they firmly decide in favor of the one ethical pathos that alone suits their finished character, they must necessarily come into conflict with the equally justified ethical power that confronts them. Modern characters, on the other hand, stand in a wealth of more accidental circumstances, within which one could act this way or that, so that the conflict which is, though occasioned by external preconditions, still essentially grounded in the character." (Hegel, ed. Glockner, vol XIV pp567-8).
These chapters act as the prologue, planting the seed for the tragic event that we know will occur. We are introduced to our characters, not noble although Briony imagines herself as an epic heroin. We have a setting that remains the same, an English country home and we have a 24 hour time frame. Briony becomes our tragic hero, and her journey through guilt and redemption begins as is foreshadowed in the title of the novel "Atonement".
