Victims and Suffering Flashcards
(5 cards)
Q: How does McEwan present Robbie as a central victim of injustice and emotional suffering?
🎯 AO1:
Robbie is framed as the novel’s most tragic victim — falsely accused, imprisoned, exiled, and ultimately killed. His suffering is both emotional and systemic, and McEwan uses his character to interrogate the violence of institutional injustice and personal betrayal.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Characterisation through contrast: intelligence, dignity vs. his treatment
Narrative manipulation: Briony’s perspective distorts him
Motif of confinement: prison, war, and narrative distortion all limit him
💬 Quote (pg. 209):
“When they wrecked your life, they wrecked mine.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Like Caroline in TMoRA, Robbie is a victim of the narrator’s deception. Both suffer unknowingly, framed by those who control the story — Briony and Sheppard.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Robbie represents the invisible cost of narrative error — a victim not just of crime, but of fiction. His suffering calls into question whether atonement can ever match the scale of harm.
Q: How is Cecilia’s suffering shaped by love, class, and silence?
🎯 AO1:
Cecilia is a silent victim — her suffering is relational, emotional, and quiet. She loses her family, her lover, and ultimately her life, yet is denied narrative control. Her pain reflects the gendered, internalised suffering often overlooked.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Limited narrative access: much of Cecilia’s experience is hidden
Symbolism: the fountain, the broken vase = fragility and miscommunication
Tragic tone in Part Two: her death occurs off-page, increasing its emotional weight
💬 Quote (pg. 292):
“Robbie, Robbie Turner, who had been their love and their future.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Cecilia’s suffering mirrors Caroline’s — both lose someone they love to a crime hidden in plain sight. But Caroline is spared the truth; Cecilia dies in it.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Some critics argue Cecilia is sacrificed by the narrative — a passive victim, erased by the violence of others. Her suffering is a form of emotional collateral, barely acknowledged within Briony’s fictional resolution.
Q: How is Briony both a victim and a cause of suffering?
🎯 AO1:
Briony is a complex figure — both criminal and victim. As a child, she suffers from emotional confusion and overwhelming guilt; as an adult, she lives under the weight of irreversible harm.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Focalisation: reveals her confusion and immaturity
Guilt-infused narration in Part Three
Symbolism: her typewriter = tool of damage and attempted healing
💬 Quote (pg. 285):
“She would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Briony, like Sheppard, is a self-aware criminal, but unlike him, she suffers deeply. Where Sheppard maintains composure, Briony is fractured by remorse — both are authors of pain, but only one is damaged by it.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Briony’s suffering may evoke sympathy or scepticism — is her pain real, or a form of narrative self-exoneration? Her victimhood is morally complex.
Q: How is Lola positioned as both a victim and complicit survivor?
🎯 AO1:
Lola is an ambiguous figure — clearly a victim of rape, yet never names her abuser and marries him. Her survival is enabled by silence, and her suffering becomes politically and narratively uncomfortable.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Understatement: her assault is described obliquely
Ambiguity in dialogue and narration
Contrast: her social advancement vs. moral truth
💬 Quote (pg. 285):
“Briony was more than implicated in this union. She had made it possible.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Marshall and Sheppard both commit crimes and escape justice. Lola and Caroline are linked as women shaped by lies, though Lola adapts, while Caroline remains unknowing.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
Lola’s silence may be seen as self-protective or complicit. Critics debate whether she is another victim, or part of the system that protects male violence through performance.
Q: What does the novel suggest about the emotional cost of suffering?
🎯 AO1:
Suffering in Atonement is not always visible or resolved — it lingers, shapes lives, and remains beyond the reach of narrative repair. Emotional trauma becomes the enduring residue of moral failure.
🧠 AO2 – Technique:
Narrative fragmentation mirrors fractured psychology
Motif of time and memory: suffering stretches across decades
Ambiguous closure: there is no catharsis, only quiet continuation
💬 Quote (pg. 263):
“She had made the wrong choice… she could not make it right.”
🔗 AO4 – Ackroyd Comparison:
Both novels show that victims rarely get justice. In Ackroyd, truth is revealed too late. In Atonement, truth cannot heal what’s already destroyed.
🧠 AO5 – Interpretation:
McEwan suggests that suffering is not neatly resolved — it becomes part of the characters’ identity. The novel resists redemptive arcs, portraying pain as ongoing, unfixable, and often invisible.
