The Trauma Narrative In Ian Mcewan’s Atonement

Ian Mc Ewan has been celebrated as one of the most representative contemporary British writers.This study chooses Atonement(2001)for exploration.It tells the story of how a seventy-seven years old female novelist Briony reviews the complicated history of twentieth century by the ending of it.And it unfolds in the thread of a childhood mistake that haunts her for fifty-nine years.This thesis intends to study how the different layers of trauma narrative in the novel structurally trigger what J.Hillis Miller calls “reader’s trauma” step by step.The main body of this dissertation relatively consists of three chapters.Chapter One aims to talk about the detailed reenactment of twentieth century personal trauma in two aspects including family and class.Briony’s memoir functions as the medium where she can enter different characters’ mind to restore the lost meaning of personal traumatic experiences.Chapter Two discusses how Briony’s memoir serves as a witness to the collective trauma memory of second World War.The epilogue exposes Part Two to be Briony’s imagination of Robbie’s trek to Dunkirk based on letters,spearheading the national myth of Dunkirk Evacuation and the crisis of truth in witnessing.Chapter Three focuses on how the metafiction epilogue surprisingly triggers reader’s trauma.Reader’s sudden realization of Briony’s life-time transformation of trauma into literature like Woolf and the gradual recognition of the visual references in the texts leaves a permanent mark in their mind to think about the role of trauma literature and the moral responsibility of novelist.Through the study of different layers of trauma narrative in Atonement,it is concluded that reader’s trauma is brought by Mc Ewan’s design on the metafiction epilogue to overturn reader’s previous assumption on personal traumatic experiences and collective cultural memory.The novel ultimately intends to put emphasis on the role of literature to provoke public’s reflection on traumatic history and mainstream cultural memory.