Motifs: Love, Money, Danger, Death Flashcards
(5 cards)
Q: How does McEwan use love as a motif to intensify loss and injustice?
🎯 AO1:
Love in Atonement is both idealised and unattainable. Robbie and Cecilia’s relationship is sincere and transformative, but it becomes a casualty of narrative error, turning love into a symbol of what is lost when truth is distorted.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Romantic imagery: water, letters, closeness at distance
Narrative inversion: their love is “real,” but its happy ending is fiction
Symbolism: their love survives only in Briony’s novel
💬 Quote (pg. 292):
“Robbie, Robbie Turner, who had been their love and their future.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
In Ackroyd, Caroline’s love is used and destroyed by Sheppard’s betrayal. Both novels show love as a collateral victim of crime — an emotional truth sacrificed to narrative control.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Some critics view Robbie and Cecilia’s love as a moral centre McEwan deliberately shatters, emphasising the cost of falsehood. Love becomes a fiction preserved, but never lived.
Q: How does the motif of money expose moral failure and corruption?
🎯 AO1:
Money in Atonement does not just signify wealth, but protection and power. Paul Marshall’s financial privilege allows him to avoid justice and rewrite his public image, exposing the failure of morality when filtered through class.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Symbolism: “Amo” chocolate bar = capitalism glossing over violence
Characterisation: Paul as confident, performative, untouchable
Irony: he funds the war effort, despite destroying lives
💬 Quote (pg. 285):
“She had made it possible.” (in reference to Marshall’s marriage to Lola)
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Just like Ackroyd is wealthy and respected, Paul uses money to obscure criminality. In both novels, wealth distorts perception, shielding guilt and buying silence.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Critics argue Paul represents the capitalist criminal — his money doesn’t redeem, it erases. McEwan uses wealth as a mask for structural evil.
Q: How is danger presented as psychological, not just physical?
🎯 AO1:
Danger in Atonement is not located in war or violence alone — it lies in misinterpretation, miscommunication, and narrative power. The greatest danger comes from belief mistaken for truth.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Child’s-eye perspective creates perceived danger from misreading
Foreshadowing and dream imagery heighten unease
Symbolism: fountain scene as misunderstood danger
💬 Quote (pg. 123):
“Her immediate understanding was that she had interrupted an attack.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
In both novels, the greatest danger is internal — not murder itself, but the lies, assumptions, and omissions surrounding it. Briony and Sheppard both create danger through narration.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
McEwan reframes danger as epistemological — it’s not what’s done, but what’s believed that harms. This destabilises traditional crime fiction, where danger is external and obvious.
Q: How does death function as both reality and narrative device in the novel?
🎯 AO1:
Death in Atonement is the ultimate irreversibility. Robbie and Cecilia’s deaths render forgiveness and justice impossible, yet McEwan makes death a narrative tool, twisted by Briony to offer emotional consolation.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Structural concealment: their deaths are revealed after a fake happy ending
Final chapter voice: Briony confesses her fictionalisation
Juxtaposition: real loss vs. written salvation
💬 Quote (pg. 370):
“The lovers survive and flourish. It is not the story’s conclusion…”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
In Ackroyd, death starts the narrative; in Atonement, it ends and reframes it. Both novels treat death as narrative hinges, but only one offers closure.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Atonement suggests death is the one truth Briony cannot rewrite. Her attempt to fictionalise it reveals fiction’s limits — narrative power ends at death.
Q: How do these motifs combine to show the cost of narrative control?
🎯 AO1:
Love, money, danger, and death become motifs manipulated through storytelling. McEwan uses them to expose the moral risk of narrative power — how fiction can preserve, distort, or erase reality.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Metafictional layering: Briony as both author and manipulator
Motif recurrence: each symbol reappears with altered meaning
Ending reversal: truth is delayed, comfort substituted for it
💬 Quote (pg. 371):
“What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from an ending like that?”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Both novels show that the storyteller can bury the truth. Sheppard hides behind formal calm; Briony hides behind literary confession. Love becomes fantasy; death becomes a plot device.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
McEwan critiques the aestheticisation of trauma. These motifs aren’t just emotional — they’re the currency of fiction, and Atonement asks whether they should be.
