Atonement

1. Michelle Moore Tatiana Rosado Shannon Stephens James Brubaker Julia Kilgore Atonement

2. Author is God - Atonement “The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelist, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.” Page 350

3. Author is God - Power to Choose Other’s Fate “That a girl so brittle and domineering should be brought this low by a couple of nine-year-old boys seemed wondrous to Briony, and it gave her a sense of her own power. It was what lay behind this near-joyful feeling. Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people-there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.” Page 110

4. Author is God - Perfection “It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story needed to have.” Page 38 “The best that could be said was that Arabella’s lack of freckles was the sign- the hieroglyph, Briony might have written-of her distinction . Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.” Page 10

5. Author is God - Author Themselves “Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? Only when a story was finished, all fates resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends so it resembled, at least in this one respect, every other finished story in the world , could she feel immune, and ready to punch holes in the margins, bind the chapters with pieces of string, paint or draw the cover, and take the finished work to show to her mother, or her father, when he was home” Page 6