Authorial Atonement in Ian McEwan's Atonement and Sweet Tooth
Ian's McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement ends with a question: "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350). And it concludes, in response to this question, that there "There is . No atonement for God, or noveli...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
[2019]
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| In: |
Christianity & literature
Year: 2019, Volume: 68, Issue: 2, Pages: 297-310 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture NBK Soteriology |
| Further subjects: | B
metafiction
B Sweet Tooth B reader response B Ian McEwan B New Atheism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | Ian's McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement ends with a question: "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350). And it concludes, in response to this question, that there "There is . No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists" (350-51). I consider in the first part of this article what leads Briony Tallis, the novel's fictive author, to this bleak conclusion. In the second part I consider how McEwan takes up the question again in his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth and how he arrives at a more hopeful answer. |
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| ISSN: | 2056-5666 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1177/0148333118794017 |