Shifting Signifiers and Self-Referentiality in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Abstract

an McEwan’s novel Atonement, a seminal work first published in 2001, is a
new perspective on a major historical event, World War II. The metafiction novel was
adapted into an award-winning film in 2007. The novel deploys structure, form and
language to unique effect. Interspersed with the many narratives of the characters
within the book, McEwan plays with words and meaning to bring out their essential
unreliability. The novel uses a quintessential modernist technique, the stream of
consciousness. However, while other writers in the past used this in order to show a
train of thought, McEwan employs it to further enrich the modernist construction. The
method he uses is to pick up a situation in the novel, and then present it from varied
points of view. This achieves a dual purpose, firstly, to question the nature of reality
and fixed meaning, and secondly, to bring out the fact that history itself is a construct
and passes down through the coloured perspectives of its narrators.