| Ian Russell McEwan(1948-)is one of the most influential writers in the current British literature.With Amsterdam McEwan won the Man Book prize in 1998,and three years later,he published his eighth novel Atonement,which was another great success.The book has since drawn extensive attention and met quite a mixed response.By far,overseas scholars have studied the work from such aspects as narratology,literary ethics,intertextuality etc.,while research at home taking similar perspectives,has shown great enthusiasm for the personage of Briony,who dedicated a whole novel so as to atone for her childhood thoughtlessness,in which she herself was one of the primal characters.It should be noted nonetheless,that there is still room for improvements to be made insofar as firstly,the other personages in the story have played a no less significant role,at least jointly,in facilitating its ending;and secondly,statistical evidence is essentially a thing of eloquence,especially when it comes to interpreting the linguistics that reflects the ‘experiences' of one personage—in both its external,physical world and its internal,spiritual world—a job the system of transitivity is exceedingly capable of.Therefore,a study integrating these two points in its discussion is justified,of which kind THIS very study in question aspires to be.Ian McEwan has in the novel expressed his concern over the danger of misreading,something people face when they enter into a fictional world and something not as easy as it seems to avoid.Bearing this in mind,this study takes a close look at two episodes of the novel which may give rise to the kind of danger earnestly warned by the author—at least as far as those less considerate readers are concerned.One has to do with Lola,that is,her role in the ‘crime' Briony atoned for,the case fabricated against Robbie,and the other with Briony herself,that is,her ‘love affair' with Robbie Turner on a summer day in 1932,referred to as the ‘external' and ‘internal' factors respectively in this study.The body of the thesis is thus divided into two parts—a transitivity analysis on the figure of Lola Quincey followed by a transitivity analysis on the figure of Briony Tallis.Specifically,as for each of the scenes selected for analysis from the novel,the numbers of each type of the clauses categorized in the system of transitivity from the ideational metafunction of the Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG)are counted,with explanation provided thereafter.The study also probes into the Participants and Circumstances of a clause,where they serve a better job in interpreting the intentions of the characters and above all,their ‘true selves',by comparing the results of the different scenes concerned.From the analyses it is known that rather than an intentional deed,it is in the eyes of Briony a thing of righteousness—and of indeliberateness—that she sent the innocent Robbie into prison in an attempt to spare her sister Cecilia further attacks.It's ascribable on the one hand to the misguidance of what she has learned from the literary works she read since she was little and what she has witnessed in succession from afar earlier that day,that is,what underlies the crime as the internal factor,and on the other hand to the intricacies of her cousin Lola,that is,what facilitates the crime as the external factor.It can be concluded that the author,by extending such cognitive defects of Homo Sapiens to almost all the other characters of the story besides Briony,has in a way succeeded in debasing the efficacy of this internal factor,whereby magnifying that of the external. |
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