How does Ian McEwan convey Briony in Part One of Atonement?
At first glance, Ian McEwan presents Briony Tallis as an innocent child who simply witnessed scenes she did not understand, however what we can actually see, as the novel progresses, is that Briony is an attention seeking, self-absorbed, meddling child whose series of incorrect observations come to wreck Cecilia and Robbie’s lives.
We are introduced to Briony Tallis at the very start of the novel, when she is preparing for cousins from the North to arrive and her older brother Leon and his friend Paul Marshall’s return, so that she can perform her play ‘The Trials of Arabella’. From this we can note that Briony is an imaginative child but we also learn that she is attention seeking because she had also designed “posters, programmes and tickets’ after learning the news that her cousins would be visiting, rather than welcoming ‘Leon with another one of her stories’, this show us that Briony wants to impress her family and show that she is more than just a child. We can see that Briony is quite intelligent as she managed to write a play that ‘intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief, and instruction’ which for a child aged 13 is impressive. The reason the narrator, who we later discover is Briony, included that information about the play was because it was foreshadowing the events that followed Briony’s life. Briony would witness and inflict ‘Terror’ by misobserving Robbie and Cecilia’s actions, which would later lead to Robbie being forced to join the Army, Briony then writes of ‘relief’ as Robbie and Cecilia are reunited and finally Robbie and Cecilia give Briony a set of ‘instructions’ so that they can finally be together. McEwan writes this so that reader can see that right from the beginning Briony was always going to cause trouble for the other characters in the novel because for a child