Text World Experience Of Atonement

As a masterpiece of Ian McEwan,a British national writer,Atonement has won many awards since its publication.Its multiple narrative techniques,such as intertextuality,metafiction and multiple narrative perspectives,etc.,have attracted extensive attention from academia and media,so it has been researched by many scholars and critics.However,up to now,most of the studies on Atonement mainly focus on this novel’s writing techniques and themes,but lack the studies from cognitive poetics to dig out Atonement’s themes,reader’s cognitive mechanism and reader’s emotional experience in the process of literary narrative.In fact,Atonement’s text world is a chaotic world,because fiction and reality are indistinguishable.In the construction of the text world in Atonement,readers experience the switches of text worlds from fiction to reality,and meanwhile the interweaving of fictional world and real world makes readers experience complex and changeable emotional responses.In addition,the metafictional ending of Atonement also lets readers realize that the narrator had been deliberately deceiving readers in this novel’s first three parts,which increases readers ’difficulty of reading this novel——readers have to make world repair or even re-read Atonement’s whole text.Based on this phenomenon,this thesis applies text world theory to analyze the text world of Atonement,so as to understand how readers experience this novel’s expiatory theme through its narrative structure,and reveal the changes of readers’ emotions during reading,achieving the understanding of this novel’s narrative structure and theme from cognitive perspective.The purpose of this thesis is to explain Atonement’s theme from cognitive perspective,and stimulate readers’ emotional response to this novel.It also can further confirm text world theory’s validity in analyzing literary works’ narrative structure and readers’ emotional experience.The following are findings of this thesis:in the first place,in the fictional world,the readers can experience Briony’s efforts to atone for her guilt and feel Briony’s extreme remorse.In the second place,in the real world,Atonement’s narrator Briony advocates the possibility of expiation in literature,while Atonement’s implied author Ian McEwan denies the possibility of expiation in literary fiction,which inspires readers to think about whether Briony,the protagonist of Atonement,has successfully achieved her expiation and her self-redemption or not.It is helpful for readers to accurately interpret this novel’s expiatory theme.In the third place,in the world switches between fictional world and real world,the metafictional ending of Atonement makes its text world like a kaleidoscope,which rearranges the factors that were once thought to be unchangeable,and presents a new picture,so the whole text world of Atonement presents a scene of combination of virtuality and reality.Readers’ original reading experience is also completely broken and have to make world repair.While on the other hand,reader’s emotional experience in Atonement becomes richer,which further sblimates this novel’s expiatory theme and embodies this novel’s charm.