Write a Brief Commentary on the 3 Excerpts from Atonement

The paragraphs below are a brief commentary on three different extracts from Atonement conveying Voice and focalization.

Example A is the discussion of hatred that Robbie is feeling towards Briony. We can identify that the passage is focalized through Robbie’s perspective. We can see this as the implied author’s thoughts and assumptions are conveyed to us. Free indirect thought has been used in this passage, for example “In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now” (McEwan 139). In this passage it is Briony’s speech and thoughts that we are feeling. The implied author is allowing Briony’s voice to show us her thoughts and emotions . In his book the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative H. Porter Abbott defines distance as being “the distance between the narrator’s moral, emotional or intellectual sensibilities and those of the implied author” (Abbott 232). We can see that there is very little distance in this passage as Briony, the narrator, is very closely linked to other characters within the novel which affects the extent to which us as the reader can trust the information that we are receiving from her, which therefore makes it very unreliable information as we don’t actually know that it happened, we only know that Briony thinks it.

In Example B, we are being conveyed the moment in which Briony is nursing the soldier in the ward. From this passage we can see that it is focalized through Briony and it is also her thoughts/speech that we are being exposed to. However the Briony that we are being focalised through is a more grown up Briony, compared to Example A, where it is the younger, child Briony. With saying that, the passage is focalised and all thoughts/speech that are represented, are through Briony, there are also moments where direct discourse is used through the solider, for example “Tallis. That’s very pretty” (McEwan 306). The rest of the passage is indirect discourse through Briony, the use of this technique...