Paradoxical History In Atonement

In contemporary British literature, Ian McEwan is one of the most distinguished novelists, whose works are shortlisted in quite a few literature rewards and enjoy wild readership. In 1998, his fiction Amsterdam enables him to capture the highest reward in British literature——Book Prize in that year and therefore consolidates his incontestably status of the first-rank writer in the contemporary British literary circle as well as on the scale of world.Atonement, published in 2002, is considered as his most appealing and successful novel in McEwan's career. TIME Magazine named Atonement in its list All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. The historical elements and dimensions permeate through the novel. The interweaving of narratives of family history alongside parallel public events moves forwards to cover few years before the Second World War, including the war and then on to the last year of new millennium, which act as a largely chronological backdrop to other kinds of history in the novel. In addition, it maps personal histories on to broader political and social movements and events, which enrich and expand the concerns and horizon of history.Combined with the theories current in historical writing, especially with postmodernist perceptions of fiction concerning history, the thesis explores the characteristic of paradox in history and historical representation in Atonement from three aspects. In terms of historical representation, the paradox is manifested in destruction and reconstruction of history; as far as the conception of historical view is concerned, it demonstrates termination and procession of history; with regard to the attitude towards history, it manifest the possessing of and fleeing from history. Such paradoxical feature reveals ambivalence and contradiction of history and of other relevant concerns eliciting from history, and such feature is in accord with the context of postmodernism that accentuates indeterminacy and infinite meanings of text. By doing this, McEwan poignantly expresses the thought-provoking consideration over human and society, and makes the novel intriguingly tantalizing.The thesis consists of five parts, with the three chapters coming between the introduction and conclusion.The chapter one is dedicated to discussing how histories represented in the novel in a paradoxical way. The specific history to be deconstructed is oriented towards the mythologized history of Dunkirk Retreat. Unlike the official textual history, exemplified by Churchill's speech on the retreat, McEwan creates another version of history that poses the challenge to the largely romanticized official history. Such deconstruction is further reinforced by parodying of archetypes embodied by Robbie. On the other hand, McEwan unearths trivial histories, which are reduced to the position of periphery because of being concealed by the mainstream conception of social phenomenon. McEwan reconstructs the histories by supplementing history on the wide scale, and in this way, McEwan restores a society, if just its lineament and silhouette, with its prismatic sides.The second part concentrates on the direction of history, which promotes the debatable discussion in the academic of history and postmodernist critics. The chapter analyses the question by focusing on the three aspects:time-setting, enormity of irretrievable loss and the structure of the novel. Each aspect dictates two directions of history paradoxically.The third part is engaged in the paradoxical attitude of possessing of and fleeing from history in characters, and expanding to the western society——both fears of loss and fear that it is not lost enough. Such a paradoxical fantasy is saliently exemplified by Brinoy's operation of writing that has double functions of acting as witness and testimony, and as a ritualistic procedure of burying history in case of its resurrection through her life-long repetitive writing.