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CHAPTER II
INTERTEXTUALITY IN IAN McEWAN’S NOVELS
2.1. Introduction
This chapter explores the intertextuality in novels of Ian McEwan.
It takes into account the theoretical base of intertextuality prepared in the
last chapter for the analysis and interpretation of the select novels of Ian
McEwan. The characteristic features and elements of intertextuality
which are analyzed in the first chapter are utilized in the study of Ian
McEwan’s novels.

2.2. Atonement

2.2.1. Introduction

Atonement opens on the hot day of 1935, against the forthcoming

atmosphere of World War Second. It is a story of a lover’s separation
brought about the ‘innocent’ guilt of the protagonist, narrator and author
Briony Tallis. It is a work of atonement on the childhood mistake of
Briony. She was wrongly accused Robbie Turner, the lover of her elder
sister, of molestation of Briony’s Cousin Lola. The narration starts in
1935 and ends after some six decades when Briony comes to know the
‘truth’ or the mistake she did when she was on the brink of puberty. The
story is complicated though a third-person narrator tells it; there are some
complications in the understanding of the novel. The question is created
that who is telling the story and who is the author. The plot is not linear,
and characterization is not simple or two-dimensional. This novel is a
meditation on the act of testimony by Briony Tallis on the accusation of
Robbie Turner. Interestingly, while telling the story Briony is not aware
of all the facts and sometimes mixes the fiction.
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It is the story of two lovers Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner. They
just came home completing their education at Cambridge. Cecilia belongs
to the upper class, and Robbie is the son of a cleaning lady in Cecilia’s
house. He is adopted by Jack Tallis, father of Cecilia, Briony and Leon.

This novel is the epitome of intertextuality. It is the story of Tallis

Household especially the story of Cecelia and Robbie’s love relationship
interrupted by Briony’s undesirable imagination. It is divided into four
parts, but the story is moving around ups and downs of Robbie and
Cecilia’s life and Briony’s atonement for making their life so wretched.
This novel is in the tradition of multiple endings of John Fowles’ The
French Lieutenant’s Woman.

To Focus upon the intertextuality of Atonement, it is indebted to

other novels such as The Go- Between by L.P. Hartley, Lady Chatterley’s
Lover by D.H. Lawrence, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, To The
Lighthouse, The Wave and Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, A
Passage to India by E.M. Foster, The Blind Assassin by Margaret
Atwood, The Golden Bowl by Henry James, and poems such as Ode On
Grecian Urn by John Keats and In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H.
Auden. The novel’s epigraph is taken from Austen’s Northanger Abbey,
and some quotes from various novels and some of from even
Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet, Macbeth, Tempest and Twelfth Night.
Especially, McEwan acknowledges that he is directly influenced by L.P.
Hartley’s The Go- Between.
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2.2.2. Atonement and 19th Century Novel’s Influences

In this novel, McEwan creates a literary world influenced by the

specters of famed characters from masterpieces. The intertextual quality
of the novel is created through a young girl whose lifelong consequences
of her terrible fabrication have fascinated critics. Particularly, in
Atonement those who focus on the novel’s first section.

Brian Finney explains that Atonement as “a rereading of the classic

realist novel of the nineteenth century, just as it is a displacement of the
modernist novel, particularly as instanced in the fiction of Virginia Woolf
and D.H. Lawrence” (Finney: 73). Epigraph of the novel is taken from
Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818) which is an ironic
declaration to the reader to be suspicious of the literary imagination and is
also a checker of how in the writing of it. McEwan called it “My Jane
Austen’s novel, my country house novel, my one-hot day novel”
(Kellaway: web). The reference of Jane Austen at first is slightly
considering his earlier novels, but this is also an apt label. The country
house setting, the subtle challenge to class difference and all ironic
depiction of the dangers of literary imagination are woven together.

Ian McEwan confirms the influence of 19thcentury novels on his

writing in an interview with Lynn. He has cleared that Atonement could
not be possible “Without all the experiments in fiction and reflections on
point of view” (AT: 133-134). He argues about the ‘notion of the
characters’ and the impact of the movement of the modernism and
postmodernism that we should not turn away from the 19thcentury
“formalized” characters. He refers to Jane Austen, Honore de Balzac,
Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert as an example of “an earlier
authors who have taught us to look into minds of characters” (Lynn: 128).
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Judith Seaboyer in an article “Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism

and the Novel of Ideas” assert that McEwan’s novels demonstrate both
aspects of reformist politics and strongly observed its contemporary
details. She compares his work with George Eliot and Virginia Woolf
(Seaboyer: 23). In the case of Atonement she argues that the novel
puzzles the reader over how to line ethical life. She admits that, “As we
have seen McEwan’s realism holds up nicely polished mirror to show us
reality, but with Atonement he allows us to experience the ethics of
writing and reading that reality” (Seaboyer:32).

McEwan says that we can find the bridge here of 19th-century

novels and novels of Virginia Woolf and others. Atonement must be
compared with The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles
on the point of deconstructing the format of 19th-century realistic novel
and importantly its multiple ending features. In this kind of ending where
the readers are left to choose ending. Geoff Dyer’s in his review argues
that:

While John Fowles was working on The French Lieutenant’s

Woman, he reminded himself that this was not a book that
one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write but, perhaps
one that they failed to write. A similar impulse underwrites
Atonement. It is a less about novelist harking nostalgically
back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than it is about
creatively extending and having a defining part of British
literary tradition up to and into the twenty-first
century.(Dyer: web)
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2.2.3. Briony is one of the Select Brands of Literary Children

The character of Briony exhibits that it should be placed in the

context of previous characters. It is exemplified by Kellaway in the point
that she compares Briony with literary children such as Maisie in Henry
James’s What Maisie Knew and Leo in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between.
It is because Briony is a kind of a child character who becomes
implicated in an adult sexual relationship which she does not understand’
(Kellaway).

2.2.4. Mixing of Genre of War Literature

Dunkirk section in Part Two of the novel and the description of the
treatment of the wounded soldiers in Part Three apparently disclose that
the novel belongs to the genre of war literature. The provided material for
war stories goes back to the war writers of twenties and early twenty-first
century. The World War First inspired number of works such as Birdsong
(1993) by Sebastian Faulks and Regeneration trilogy by Pet Barker. More
importantly the World War Second is also the backdrop to ‘spies’ (2002)
by Michal Frayn, which draws adults’ perspective of childhood.

2.2.5. Literary Imagination

From the epigraph onwards the narrative of the Part First is

threaded through literary allusions, which depending on one’s point of
view, adds weight to the literariness, or perhaps brings it down with
cleverness. Peter Kemp considers this element to be a distinctive bonus:
one character reads Richardson’s Clarissa a tale of rape and atonement.
In the college production Robbie has played the role of Malvolio from
Twelfth Night, a man from below stairs whose aspirations are cruelly
thwarted. Further, Kemp observes the epigraph of the novel from
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Austen’s Northanger Abbey, that he described as a ‘comedy of misplaced

accusations that lead to ‘shame’ as well as the echoes of D. H. Lawrence
and T. S. Eliot ‘and the like’. Regarding all this overt intertextuality as
upholding the central theme: Kemp calls it ‘dangers of imagination’
(2001). In the view of Kemp, the borrowing and reference to literature are
the foundations of the novel and that are apparent from the first page.

Judith Seaboyer argues that the narrative has ethical elements in

which there is the warning of the dangers of control and imagination
implicitly recorded in the account of the character Briony. But the chance
the reader may be drawn into believing this most unreliable of narrator
means that maintains an ambivalent edge. Seaboyer states that:

The process of being drawn into Briony’s/McEwan’s

doubled narrative is a little like the process of being seduced
by the attractions of Milton’s Satan. Thus, as Stanley Fish
has argued, experiencing is small the seduction and fall of
humanity. (Seaboyer: 32)

The above quote explores the view that Briony may be claiming to
attempt to atone for her sin against Robbie, but she may also be accused
of ‘colonizing’ him for the sake of her writing’ (Seaboyer: 32).
Atonement is mainly concerned with two themes that are literary
imagination and the art of novel writing.

Robbie is presented here as a hero, saint-like, sufferance and he

should be associated with Briony’s claim of atonement as she constructs
him as a hero. This image of him is highlighted when one considers how
he is injured in Part Two of the novel has echoes of Caravaggio’s
painting Doubting Thomas where Thomas looks for proof of Christ’s
resurrection by probing him.
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2.2.6. The Literary Figures: Robbie and Cecilia

These two figures are used as codes to symbolize their love in

order to bypass the censor during his time in prison: this couple is
compared with literary figure such as: ‘Tristan and Isolde’, ‘The Orsino
and Olivia’, (and Malvolio too), ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, ‘Mr. Knightly
and Emma’, ‘Venus and Adonis’, ‘Turner and Tallis’. (At: 204) In
despair, Robbie compares himself with Prometheus.

These literary couples remind us that Atonement is a novel of love.

In the last section, Briony admits that Robbie and Cecilia belong to the
realm of romantic lovers, and she had made them comply with the
expectations that have been learned in the past. A typical romantic love,
they are separated by obstacles such as class, prison, an unexpected
doubts, war, and still this does not separate them: only death can divide
them before unification is possible.

In the Part One the readers’ attention drawn to the fact that the
Tallis family a typical 1950s bourgeoisie family. John Mullan in an
interview with McEwan points out the dramatic irony behind the
converse, as Briony has already seen Robbie in the library with Cecilia.
In which Leon is acting a kind of social lubricant. Cecilia argues in a
letter that Leon and rest of her family are to be condemned for their belief
in Robbie’s guilt. Robbie is frightened by accusation of Lola’s rape
exclaims:

My mother never forgave you’re first. My father preferred to

lose himself in his work. Leon turned out to be a grinning,
spineless idiot who went along with everyone else. (At: 209)

Part One of the Atonement ends with Robbie’s arrest, and this point
questions the pre-war calm with the use of characters such as Leon and
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Emily, and also represents the crumbling home. On the surface they
appear enviable for their privileged existence, but in reality they are seen
to be as damaged and unoriginal as the 40-years-old house that aspires to
be thought of as embodying centuries, but of tradition but is riddled with
faults.

2.2.7. Adaptation in Atonement

The plot of the novel is borrowed from No Time for Romance and
The Memoir of Mrs. A Radolff. In an article in Mail on Sunday Julia
Langdon directly charges McEwan of plagiarism in Atonement. It was the
article on the similarities between McEwan’s Atonement and Lucilia
Andrews’s No Time for Romance in which Julia claims the plagiarism,
but took it differently the view that she suggests it is not ‘in dialogue’
with Andrews’ information. Rose Tremain has rightly pointed out
McEwan’s ability to transform the source material into something
“singular and new”.

The debate has been giving on the phrases of Andrews echoed in

Atonement, but captures the attention of the reader that how the novelist
uses historical material. In Atonement, McEwan inserts Briony and her
point of view, and the Part Three of the novel could not be possible
without Andrews’s work. It means that McEwan’s novel relies on
Andrews’ in a different ways. His use of historical material suggests that
there are not defined rules how writers echoes another text and about how
much another’s work can be drawn on.

McEwan’s picturesque description of the ‘Dunkirk’ scene

that ‘Dunkirk’ or a war time hospital can be novelistically
realises but they cannot be re-inverted; writers of the
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historical fiction are, he argues necessarily dependent on

‘memories as eyewitness accounts’. (At: 2)

In this way, the debate moves on plagiarism a novel Atonement

creates wider intertextual web. The novel is based on reality created by its
protagonist in an attempt to atone, which foregrounds that how historical
novel creates a version of the past, and explores narrative potential of this
mixture of history and fiction. The difference between reality and fiction
is emphasized. At the end of the novel, we are told clearly that Robbie
and Cecilia are dead: and we come to know which part of the story we
read that just really happened?

An analysis of Atonement concerned with few particular instances

in details that the novel is engaged with historical sources. The complex
meta-fictional nature of Atonement explores the question ‘what really
happened’? This is complex double hybrid question: firstly Briony’s
novel is a ‘forensic memoir’ (AT: 370), dedicated to demonstrating
Robbie’s innocence. Secondly, it forms an attempt to atone further by
giving Robbie and Cecilia’s the happy ending in fiction denied in real
life. McEwan’s novel is a novel-within-a-novel that reveals the
(rewritten) stories behind stories; it creates the atmosphere that we no
longer understand whose text we are reading.

McEwan uses a vast amount of research material in Atonement in

Part One set in 1930’s; Briony’s prose style is modeled on that of the
contemporary writers, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf. In the
making of fiction, Briony is influenced by them. Part Two is about
Robbie’s Second World War experiences and Briony’s time as a
probationer nurse at Thomas Hospital in London. It has more modern
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style. McEwan weaves into the narrative details about the retreat to
Dunkirk from histories, letters and diaries.

2.2.8. No Time for Romance and The Memoir of Mrs. A

Radloff

These two works are very pivotal in the construction of the novel
Atonement. The Part Three of Atonement is clearly depending on two
novels, one Lucilia Andrews’ No Time for Romance (1997) and the
second is The Memoir of Mrs. A Radloff. McEwan describes the
disciplines of Briony’s training, terrible injuries of soldiers from Dunkirk.
The most of the position of this chapter borrowed from Andrews: the
description of authors’ training at St. Thomas in 1991. McEwan expands
and redefines those descriptions of the difficulty of keeping up her
writing in her limited space time and needing to be careful about what she
wrote because she had no personal place to lock her notebooks.

The second source of McEwan is the memoire of Radloff. It

exhibits a number of similarities in both works. Mrs. Radloff also had
trained at St. Thomas in London and Basingstokeon the other hand
Lucilia Andrews, also worked at (injured) the soldiers from Dunkirk
evacuation. Andrews and Radloff both were working in the sector
hospitals to which the majority of St. Thomas’ staff had been evacuated.
This is what the reader finds in Atonement.

Both the women are slightly older than Briony, and they both write
in a pity and clear sighted manner that resembles older Briony’s style.
The sequence of the events of the first four sections of Part Three is based
almost exactly on Andrews’s autobiography. The part begins with
Briony’s training at St. Hospital London that emphasizes the hard work
and intense discipline of the work. Both Briny and Andrews give the
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exact picture of Dunkirk with their perception. Thus, McEwan’s Briony is

foregrounded on Andrews’s accounts of her real life spent in hospitals
especially at St. Thomas London in serving with wounded soldiers. In
this way, McEwan uses the biographical details of Andrew’s in the
construction of Briony. All the details at St. Thomas Hospital London
exhibit Andrews’s description. The details of wards cleaning, nursing the
wounded soldiers, conversation with soldiers, the senior sisters and their
orders all these details are taken from Andrews’ account. The Jaundiced
sailors are the last patients before the arrival of the waves of victims in
the both the hospitals, both Andrews and Briony finally realize what is
happening in France by reading newspaper.

McEwan remains faithful to the chronology of Andrews’s narrative

that of nursing the wounded from Dunkirk, but rewrites history a little
translating her experiences of London. In reality, both Radloff and
Andrews worked in outlining bases, and none of the wounded Soldiers
from the evacuation of France were sent to St. Thomas. Briony herself
explaining this confliction describing how she merged her experience of
working at Alder Hey, the Royal East Sussex and St. Thomas ‘in order’
“to concentrate all my experiences into one place” (At: 356)

However, in Part Three we are told that Briony intended to see

Cecilia, but in reality she never saw [Cecilia and Robbie] in that year. Her
walks across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and
awkwardly Briony walks limped back to the hospital, without her
recently bereaved sister (AT: 370-71). But in reality both Robbie and
Cecilia had died early in 1940s.

With the description of the hospital details McEwan creates the

atmosphere of intense hard-work, depersonalization, and the
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incomprehensible rules. All these creation are taken from memories of

both Andrews and Radloff. The experiences of Briony are apparently
adopted from the story of Radolff:

The dragon who met us (sister) thrust a tray of labels

disdainfully at my front and without looking at me […]. It
was marked N. Reeves. Naively, for I didn’t realize that I
now had no identity, I protested that my initial was A
‘Stupid girl’ do not you know that N stands for Nurse?.
(Radloff: 1)

The sister’s reply to Briony making the same mistake is politer but
no less alarming; ‘This was how it was going to be…’ (At: 275).

In the development of the main plot, sometimes McEwan deviates

and create other accounts of the characters. There are some reasons
specifically in the description of senior nurses frighten the juniors. Here,
Briony, Andrews and Radloff all are juniors. Briony thinks her
relationship with sister Dunkirk “and that her life on words is largely
dependents on how she stood inwards sister’s opinion” (At: 274-75).

McEwan uses Sister Drummond to personalize her disciplines

depicted by Andrews and Radloff. Briony’s daily routine is borrowed
from Andrews’s and Radloff’s selected parts. McEwan skillfully presents
basic tasks of Briony’s writing concerned with her medical experiences:
“[she had], dabbed gentian violet on ring-worm aquuaflauine emulsion on
a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise” (AT: 277). It clearly cited from
Andrews but to some extent it is different where McEwan uses and omits
some parts of it. For examples, patients ‘temperature’ is cited in the same
manner. Andrews’ list is:
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…very occasionally doing a minor surgical dressing or

removing few stitches, sticking on and removing, strapping
plaster, and handing out doses of Gee’s Linctus by the
gallon, M and B. tablets by the dozen and the tropes beloved
A.P.C. tablets by the gross. (Andrews: 67)

In the same way to give a stronger impression to the reader McEwan

shortens his list who understands that how menial and boring Briony’s
work was.

Further, the details of privations of the nurses are influenced by

Andrews’s experience and Radloff’s account. These details of Andrews
and Radloff occupy the place in three parts of Atonement. McEwan
describes how nurses’ lives are regulated by the chimes of nearly Big Ben
a detail borrowed from Radloff. “Big Ben dictated our routine we dreaded
his frequent reminders that we were late” (Radloff: 2). But McEwan in
Atonement uses this idea to exacerbate the feeling of tension “The chimes
of Big Ben marked every changed…supposed to be elsewhere”. (AT:
283)

McEwan also borrowed pans features in Briony’s nursing from

Andrews’s and Radloff’s books. In these features McEwan not only
captures how disgusting, but also stresses the bizarre attitude of nurses,
who are engaged to hospital disciplines that are expected to this task. In
Radloff’s memoirs, the nurses are told that:

[Nurse] don’t carry your bedpans like tennis rockets – carry

them to the glory of God. (Radloff: 2-3)

But in Briony’s description this appears as; ‘The day, therefore,

began…morning drink’. (AT: 283)
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Briony is told off for running the corridor with phrase “Only
hemorrhages and fires were permissible seasons for a nurse to run” (AT:
283) this is directly borrowed from Andrews’s that Andrews writes
“Please remember a nurse may only run for hemorrhage or fire”
(Andrews: 161). Here, Briony’s most of the ideas are dealing with
Andrews’s description that Andrews describes the bottle “Either I have to
employ you with my eyes should and holding my breath or I can’t empty
you at all” (Andrews: 155). McEwan skillfully describes how Briony
discovers the trick of emptying bottles, “the tricks of emptying them in
fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes, hold her
breath and avert her head” (AT: 283).

The question is created here in McEwan’s use of Andrews’s

description in his novel that the honour of Andrews is missed in
McEwan’s version. McEwan’s world and presentation are disciplined and
strict it is because he adopts and edits his sources to create desired
picture. Apart from this description of nurses’ routine life, McEwan also
glances over some odd pieces of information from Andrews’s and
Radloff to sustain the underlying tune of strangeness.

McEwan also adopts some techniques of Andrews’s in case of bed

– bathing techniques it is only to show curiosity of sex that is hinted in
the conversation, but none explored. Andrews described models which
are “Mrs. Malkintosh, Lady Chase and George a baby boy of convenient
physique to allow him to double as a baby girl” (Andrews: 151). The
reader fells that they are reading Andrews in Atonement, “Mrs.
Mackintosh, Lady Chase and B baby George, whose blandly impaired
physique allowed him to double as a baby girl” (AT: 275). In these two
quotes the slight changes that are from ‘convenient’ to ‘blandly
impaired’. In the novel Atonement McEwan introduces a note of
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damaged, or sublimated, sexuality which is not preset in original, adding

to the atmosphere of a muffled hysteria in the novel. This is what
McEwan has borrowed from Andrews that everything related with
Briony’s nursing life. Though, he has slightly changed the source material
it is not impossible to recognize Radloff and Andrews’s, the details
regarding The Nightingale school of Nursing. McEwan recreates this, but
he deliberately does not include the stoicism and sense comradeship in
detail. He draws the material from both writers such as the lonelier, parts
of the nurses’ lives due to this, readers’ focus remains on Briony only and
her inner life. That’s why McEwan creates only one friend to Briony
unlike Andrews and Radloff, and he concentrates on only one figure of
senior sister that is Sister Drummond. Here McEwan’s aim is to create a
‘spotlight’ on Briony’s claustrophobic world.

The atmosphere McEwan creates is following Andrews’s narration

in a way that how McEwan describes. Firstly, the seriously wounded men
whom Briony encounters are seen. He is also following the chronology of
Andrews’s account, but he makes some changes to serve his narrative
ends.

In the case of soldier’s wounds and behavior McEwan adopts the

style of these writers by describing the personal details of solders and
nurses but making them behave in ways diametrically opposed to their
originals. This description of McEwan creates very futile atmosphere
which indicating that McEwan’s soldiers are less stoical and bitter and
appearing more contemporary than Andrews’s and Radloff. The terrible
description of five patients is also clearly adopted under the descriptive
style of Andrews’s. In this scene, Briony faces horrible situation that the
two of these patients are based on Andrews’s novel and Radloff’s
memoir.
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2.2.9. Allusions from Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817)

The novel Atonement begins with an epigraph from Northanger

Abbey. It is a classic piece of literature about seventeen-year-old
aficionado Catherine Moraland and family friends Mr. and Mrs. Allen as
they visit Bath. It is Catherin’s first visit there she meets new friends such
as, Isabella Thrope, John Thrope, and Henry Tinley. Catherine’s real
interest was in Henry Tinley’s love. She becomes a friend with Eleanor
Tinley, Henry’s younger sister. Henry tires to captivate Catherine by his
view on novels and knowledge of history. General Tinley is the father of
Henry and Eleanor invites Catherine to their estate Northanger Abbey. In
Catherine’s view, it is like dark, ancient and fall of Gothic horrors and
fantastic stories. Seventeen years old Catherine is fond of reading Gothic
novel especially she is fascinated by Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of
Udolpho.

Catherine’s active imagination nature leads her to stay in Tinley’s

house that nothing is strange or distressing in the room at all. Catherine
realizes that through novels may be because of the delightful content
which does not relate to everyday life.

Catherine Morland loves reading novels. She imagines as a heroine

in a Gothic novel. She observes the best in people and remains ignorant
of other people’s harmful intentions. She is best to her brother James
Morland. Catherine’s character grows through the novel as she gradually
becomes a heroine. Mainly, she is leading from her mistakes when she is
in contact with the outside world in Bath. She makes mistakes by
applying her imaginative nature.

Interfaces between intertextuality and postmodern writing writers

have discovered ways in which writers may use the intertextuality to
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subvert dominant discourses or question the relevance of traditional

genres to particular experiences. Intertextuality shows us that how
dominant discourses and genres are insufficient to present alien
subjectivity. But on semiotic level intertextuality can expose the
experience of that subjectively; through a process of estrangement
generate in the reader a replica of it.

If we accept Derrida’s ‘ecriture’ a notion of the writing or written-

ness of the subjects’ identity, the rhetoric of that writing becomes object
of study. And intertextuality or intertextual allusion becomes a major part
of that rhetoric. Intertextuality leaves the readers with so many parcels of
sophisticated textuality on their hands which inevitability occlude the
subjectivity of other, intertextuality bridges the experimental and
cognitive gaps that separate subjects. Thus, it enables fictions to achieve
their goals building empathy between reader sand characters.

It’s an evident in Atonement that Virginia looms over Briony’s

decision to become a recognized writer and Woolf is openly referred to in
Briony’s reading Woolf’s The Waves.

The impact of style of Virginia Woolf clearly indicated in the

description of Emily Tallis who lies in the bed with a migraine disease
and how she listens the movements in Tallis Household. The engagement
with postmodernism is apparent in the decision to remove the possibility
of closure in the final section and the way it highlighted through the novel
that it is a work of fiction. Closer is refused in that the first version of
Robbie and Cecilia are being united in Part Three is undetermined by
Briony in (London 1999). It is a work of fiction drags the readers out of
the realist dream and reminds them the others is deciding the auto comes.
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In this regard, Atonement becomes another's novel that exposes the role
of the novelist while challenging reader’s expectations.

2.2.10. Shifting Point of View Technique

The shifting point of view is related with the point of narration

from outer to the inner life captures the attention of the readers. The
repetitive and reflective nature of the narrative process generates the
narrative consciousness in the mind of the reader. In the case of
Atonement this perspective opens its factors very aptly. The novel is
crafted with this technique. The two chapters second and third of the
novel expose the technique intertextuality in its highest form. They
exhibit that two perspectives of Cecilia and Briony to reveal separate
interpretations of what happens when Cecilia and Robbie are at the
fountain together and struggle over the vase. This scene recalls the works
of Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

The reader moves forward quickly as the novel enters in the

segments of War that broke out across Europe. Mrs. Ramsay dies
suddenly in the night. Her oldest son Andrew Ramsay is killed in battle,
and his sister Prue die by the illness related to childbirth. The family has
no longer holidays at its summer house, which falls into a state of despair:

In the same way of the third part of To The Lighthouse where

novelist uses shifting point of view Atonement includes the journey. In
that section Mr. Ramsay declared that he, his son James and daughter
Cam will have Journey to the lighthouse.

As a beautiful and loving woman, Mrs. Ramsey is an excellent

hostess who has pride in case of making memorable experiences for the
guests at the family summer’s home. Affirming traditional gender role
wholeheartedly, she bestowed the attention on male guests whom she
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believes have a delicate ego, and need constant support and sympathy.
She is dutiful and loving wife but often struggles with her husband’s
moods and selfishness. Without fail, she triumphed through these difficult
times and emphasized the ability to make something significant.

The character of Mr. Ramsay sometimes acts as an exploiter

though he loves his family. It is because of his professional anxieties he is
selfish and harsh. He fears more than anything. He has a beautiful family;
he never tends to punish his wife, children and guests by demanding their
constant sympathy, attention and support.

Mrs. Ramsay tolerates the insufferable behaviour of others. She is

protecting entire opposite sex. According to her men, shoulder the burden
of ruling countries and manage economies. At the several points, she is
aware of her power, and her posture is far from that of the submissive
woman, at the same time interjections of domesticated anxiety. She never
compromises herself. She is able masterfully to satisfy her husband’s
desire. Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as
her struggle to find meaning in her unsteady existence. She writes in a
praised and elegant style; her work examiners the structure of human life,
from nature of the relationship to the experience of time. Her style allows
the subjective mental processes through the character to determine
objective content of her narrative.

Passage of time in To the Lighthouse is modeled by the

consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock. It is Woolf’s
experimentation with time. She develops a unique way of presenting
narrative viewpoints in her novels, the central use of point of view
technique shifts frequently from one charter to another, and shift in point
of view can occur even within a single sentence.
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In the novel Atonement, we realize at the end that a protagonist and

a writes Briony Tallis receives a rejection letter from Horizon magazine.
In the year 1940, Briony has submitted her novella ‘Two Figures by a
Faustian”. The novella is based on an episode she witnessed as a child
and drafted it as a novel. The rejection letter is a witty parody, criticizes
Briony’s story for “[owing] a little too much to the technique of Mrs.
Woolf” The author of the editor is identified as CC. [Cryill Connolly], he
was working at that time. C. C. describes Mrs. Woolf’s techniques with a
blend of praise and condescension; “The crystalline present moment is, of
course, a worthy subject in itself especially for poetry” (At: 290) he
comments loftily:

It allows the writer to show his gifts delve into the mysteries
of perception, present a modified version of thought
processes, permit the moods and unpredictability of private
self to be explored and so on….” However, such writing can
become precious when there is no sense of forward
movement … our attention would have been held even more
effectively had there been an underlying pull of simple
narrative. (294-297)

A modified version of ‘Two figures of at Fountain’ becomes

central scene in Atonement and many readers like C.C have noticed the
influence of Virginia Woolf. John Updike examined that ‘a Virginia
Woolfian shimmer overlays the Austenish plot’ of McEwan’s novel, and
New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakuntani commented on the
‘lambent Woolfian prose’ of the first section. But Woolf’s extensive
influence not only concerned with shimmer and lambency but also other
most important things are related there.
 113

Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway foregrounds the story of McEwan’s

novel and her idea regarding the fiction plays an important role in the
construction of the main character, especially Briony. The first part of the
novel Atonement is set in a traditional motion and place such a big
English house which struck the reader the familiar houses settled in
history of English novel; such as in Mansfield Park, Howards End, The
Go-Between and Brideshead Revisited. These novels are mostly set in
English houses where the story of each novel emerged and developed. In
Atonement big Tallis household also recalls the tradition of English house
which has become a metaphor of presentations.

The dominant point in the novel is that of protagonist Briony. Here

her ignorance of adult interactions recalls the youthful central characters
in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart and Henry James What
Maisie Knew the two fingers who met at fountain is a dramatized persona
and becomes central scene of the novel. We come to know this scene is
tragically misinterpreted by Briony. For the sake of other being engaged
with each other that is Cecilia and Robbie turner, a young man lives on
Tallis estate. Cecilia and Robbie have known one another all their lives
and have just completed their studies at Cambridge.

The fountain scene of the Atonement alludes to similar,

emotionally charged encounter in Mrs. Dalloway. The heat of the day,
country estate, the flowers, the opening of French windows all echo the
details of Burton which flood Clarissa Dalloway’s memory ‘as she steps
out into the London sunshine on a June morning’ (Mrs. Dalloway: 3).
Thinking of Peter Walsh, Clarissa remembers the grief and anguish of
‘that scene in the little garden by the fountain’ (Mrs. Dalloway: 8) thirty
years earlier. The details of this scene are painful and presented from
Peter’s point of view, haunted by jealousy, he had sent Clarissa a note
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asking her to meet him by the fountain where she has broken off their
relationship’ (Mrs. Dalloway: 64).

In this way, numbers of allusions are from Mrs. Dalloway

exploring the related lines to McEwan’s story. For example, in an echo of
Clarissa Dalloway’s ‘silver-green mermaid’s dress’ (Mrs. Dalloway: 40)
and Cecilia also has chosen the green dress to wear to dinner party and
looking into the mirror and sees ‘a mermaid who rose to meet her’ (AT:
92-93). And it is interesting to note that not by accident Cecilia happened
to be reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. But recalling Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway is McEwan’s abrupt juxtapositions of the pleasant world of per-
war country house and the horror of the battlefield. All these details
described in the terrible and horror manner when Robbie is made a
soldier and sent into British army’s retreat at Dunkirk. Like his literary
predecessor Septimus Smith, Robbie is also a lover of literature and
working class outsider who is destroyed by war.

Atonement is also the story of writer’s development and explore the

way that how writing fulfills the certain psychological needs. In this way
how Briony invents fairy-tale-heroes and villains: the hero is rewarded by
marriage and villain punished by death. These stories fulfill her ‘orderly
spirit’ and embodies her desires that ‘an untruly world could be made just
so’ (AT: 7). The fountain scene marks the turning point in Briony’s
literary development because the actions she observes cannot be made fit
into her favourite plot. At first watching from upstairs, she assumes that
‘a proposal of marriage’ (AT: 36).

By observing that scene Briony was puzzled ‘‘the sequence will

illogical-the drowning scene followed by a rescue should have preceded
the marriage proposal’’ (AT: 59).
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This fountain scene presents Briony with new subject matter which
abandoning “fairly –tale castles and princess’ she determined to resolve
her attention to what seems far more interesting ‘the strangeness of here
and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she
knew” (AT: 36) she is enthralled by the idea that ‘she could write the
scene three times over, from three different point of view’ (AT: 38).

Unfortunately, Briony does not apply this understanding of the

point of view-to real life human relationship. Her innocence about sexual
matters her interception of an absence letter and powerful narrative pull a
new story she has created the lead to Robbie’s being convicted of a crime
he did not commit. Robbie is arrested and sent into jail after some years
Briony embraces literary Modernism and reads thrice the novel The
Waves. Here in her reading we are told about Modern Fiction and Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Her reading of the novels and her imagination
creates elements of self-deception and dishonesty in her enthusiasm that
is similar to the jumble of modernist theory. Her thoughts are one
attracted towards the modern sensibility especially ‘undefining
uncertainly’ of modernism. Other elements of modernity are also tempted
her such as:

The age of clear answer is over” therefore she no longer

believes in character and plot: she is interested only in
thoughts, perceptions and sensations” she intends “to enter a
mind and shows it at work” she believes that “a great
transformation was being worked in human nature itself, and
the fiction, a new wind of fiction, could capture the essence
of the change”. (AT: 285)
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Briony’s enthusiastic but highly selective adaptation of modernist and

Woolfian ideas about fiction allows her to avoid taking responsibility for
the damage she has done: as she later acknowledges: “The evasions of her
little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything, she did not wish to
comfort was also missing from here novella and was necessary to it” (AT:
302). To tell the truth about fountain scene, Briony realizes, she must
create characters and compose a plot.

Briony’s final version of her story turns into a complete novel

called Atonement and possesses a narrative momentum which C.C. has
pointed out in ‘Two Figures by a Fountain’. Here, the author Briony
embraces modernism in her youth, and she has disparaged charters and
plots as ‘rusted machinery’ creates a suspenseful narrative with characters
who engage the reader.

In this way, in Atonement both the technique of Mrs. Woolf and

her ideas about fiction are central to McEwan’s young artist Briony’s
portraits.

2.2.11. Allusions in Atonement

T. S. Eliot in his seminal work Tradition and Individual Talent

claims, “Writers best work often occurs in places where ‘the dead poets,
his [the writer’s] ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously”
(467).

Significantly, regarding this view Ian McEwan is constantly using

this view in his work and inspiring his writing with reference to the
literary practices of his predecessors. The selected novel of McEwan
haunted by the framed charters, ideas, techniques and themes are from the
realm of earlier fictions. No doubt, the intersexual quality of Atonement is
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by using a young girl as a writer with high imagination fascinates critics,

peculiarly to those who focus on the first section.

It is also noted by Eard G. Ingersoll (AT: 249) and Maria

Margaronis (AT: 142) that McEwan’s use of the country house in the
opening section of the novel. Pilar Hidalgo also emphasizes the Part
One’s connections with other works such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey
and James Joyce’s What Maisie Knew to Waugh’s Brides head Revisited’
(AT: 84).

It is realized that McEwan is not only concerned with the diggings

of 19th and 20 th century predecessors for literary inspiration, but he also
presets the literary productions which are much more remote: the middle
ages.

The theme atonement, itself rapidly offers the reference of

medieval characters that are found in Chaucer’s oeuvre and Arthurian
Romance; such as Troilus and Criseyde, Tristan and Isolde (AT: 192).
McEwan very skillfully evokes King Arthur by having Briony, the young
self-involved member of Tallis family mimics legendary Briton in her
desire to wait for pre-dinner miracle (AT: 72). Though, medieval
allusions in the novel have received little critical attention that the
modern allusions also in the text.

McEwan’s novels indebted towards the theory of mind and he said

the most of the values ‘fiction for its ability to portray “what it means to
be someone else” and in his fiction, the limits of imagination are
repeatedly foregrounded as major drive of characters and plots. His
presentation of Briony in Atonement in regards with theory of mind that is
corpus of childhood transformation through imaginative identification.
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Atonement is a highly examined text of metanarrative by McEwan.

It treats the act of narration in various ways. On a paratextual level it
quotes from Northanger Abbey an epigraph, which is about the teenage
Briony who obsessed with literature. The shifting point of narration from
outer to the inner life captures the attention of the readers. The repetitive
and reflective nature of the narrative process generates narrative
consciousness in the reader. For example:

I have been thinking about my last novel, the one that should
have been my first. The earliest version is in January 1940,
the latest, March 1990, and in both half a dozen different
drafts. The second draft June 1947, the third who cares to
know? My fifty-nine years assignment is over. (AT: 369)

The reader is confused with vivid references and confronted with

the narratives from other works/writers. To present such a heterogeneous
account of others work and jolting together various works to the
construction of the novel is a typical postmodern narrative fashion which
plays very eminent role in this novel Atonement.

McEwan is categorized as a typical postmodern writer who plays

with boundaries of fact and fiction and draws our attention to the
‘fictionality, the constructed nature of his writing’ and ‘to the narrative
creation of the world’ by introducing the protagonists who are the
narrators or authors.

Some critics emphasizing McEwan’s intertextual practices seem

interested primarily determining Atonement’s relationship with other
texts. Brian Finney mentions briefly about Robbie’s transformation into a
Petrarchan Lover following his encounter at the fountain with his owner’s
daughter, Cecilia (Finney: 78), the critics concentrate on the ways in
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which Atonement offers a trenchant critique of realist novel, particularly

its method of pointing its states as fiction (Finney: 73).

Cormak too focuses on Atonement’s position with other novels and

stresses that McEwan’s novel represents a ‘return to the heart of the Great
Tradition of English Novelists’ (Cormak: 79). Richard Pedot concentrates
on Atonement’s ‘conversation with modernism’, as opposed to realism,
though there are potential influences of modernist poets such as, Eliot,
Auden whom McEwan places in his novel’s pivotal chapter.

By analyzing the medieval allusions that McEwan has embedded in

his story, critics can uncover meanings that might otherwise remain
covert. In Atonement allusions from medieval literature begin at the end
of Part One and flowed up to the Second Part, during Robbie’s forceful
participation in terrible retreat to Dunkirk. In Part Two the recorded
McEwan uses the references of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, who
predominantly uses medieval allusions. These allusions are providing him
the way to indicate the poetic rather than novelistic nature of his text
(McEwan’s). His reliance on medical allusions or the literature of Middle
Ages perhaps helps him to develop his novel’s main themes: the nature of
writing and atonement.

McEwan’s reference to the most famous medieval lovers Troilus

and Criseyde in Part One are foregrounding to his lovers Robbie and
Cecilia. In these two medieval and modern lovers the main issue is both
are indebted towards their deep-seated anxiety regarding their affair. The
same story is repeating here that Robbie is representing as a Troilus and
Cecilia as a Criseyde. It is because; McEwan’s lovers find themselves
places in holding patterns, waiting for a moment when they can restart
their ended love affair. McEwan’s extensively use of other references
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symbolizing his novel as a distinct piece of literature. His medieval

allusions such as charters, in the later part of the novel, his use reference
from the poem The Waste Land (1922) are found in many Arthurian
romances. All these reference from Middle age literature are to unsettle
the reader and make them question this view that writing is inherently
noble. This view is embedded by Cecilia Tallis’s selfless refrain to her
lover, Robbie “that is so she is continuously insisting that “I will wait for
you, ‘Come Back’” (AT: 190). By placing medical allusions McEwan
may want to prove that that writing is may be futile or it may deadly.

McEwan’s star-crossed lover Robbie and Cecilia are representing

to fictional figures in their letters to each-other during Robbie’s
imprisonment. It is interesting to note the list characters form a wide
variety of ears, the list of heroes and heroines in their letters employing to
themselves is marked as heavy use of medieval allusions. They always
talk about literature; both are lovers of reading history, always talking
about read novels especially Woolf’s and Austen’s.

At Cambridge, they crossed each other and talked about all

those couples who have happy and tragic end and yet they
have not discussed; Tristan and Isolde, the Duke Olivia and
Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Mr.
Knightley and Emma, Venues and Adonis and in the same
tradition the Turner (Robbie) and Tallis (Cecilia). Once, in
despair, he referred himself with Prometheus, “chained to
rock, his lives devoured daily by a vulture”. Sometimes
Cecilia too compares herself as “patient Griselda”. (AT: 192)

It seems that the young couple relies on these literary allusions to

reveal their great attraction towards one another. The medieval characters
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to whom Robbie and Cecilia alludes and reveal their unfulfilled desires,
these references also betray their mutual understandings regarding
separation, the war and depth of their partners love. Their letters are
symbolizing Kristeva’s view that “writers often exaggerate the words, or
in this case, characters of another writer with new signification while
presenting the original meaning” (1980: 77).

The most important theme of the other work is infidelity that plays
very outstanding role in the construction of the characters. In the case of
Troilus and Criseyde and Tristan’s and Isolde’s tales, Troilus is
emphasizing woman’s unfaithful nature and Tristan focusing the man’s
disloyalty. Similar to it Robbie is also in a dilemma whether Cecilia will
with him or not. In the novel, McEwan skillfully does not give hints that
who uses this tale in the letters but it seems Robbie is the first introducer
of the tale Troilus and Cecilia, and he employs Tristan.

In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde’s love is temporary

for that she cheats Troilus soon after departing for Greek camp. Leaving
him far away in Troy and ultimately to die on the battlefield. By
accounting, this Robbie probably used this narrative to expose his fear
that Cecilia will prove untrue and affects his ruin. Thomas’s Tristan may
prompt similar feelings in Cecilia. In the story of Tristan, the hero betrays
heroine and marries with another lady and does not remain faithful to
Isolde. This story evokes Robbie’s departure for the continent it underlies
Cecilia’s disappointment regarding Robbie’s fidelity. Robbie and
Cecilia’s believe on these betrays or fears that is revealed at the time of
their meeting. Since his imprisonment Cecilia for the first time conveys
“Everything they had, [sic] rested on few minutes in a library year ago,
bless is too frail?” (AT: 193).
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McEwan very technically places These medieval allusions that

they unmask Cecilia and Robbie’s inner anxiety of the terrible war. At
first Robbie is compared to Chaucer’s Troilus and Cecilia is that of
Criseyde. Here Robbie inevitably compared England as a doomed city
like Troy that all these thing he (Robbie) implies to himself and to his
country also. The story of Tristan and Isolde’s fascinates Cecilia who
discovers the condition of war and indicates geographical similarities
between two couple’s separation and union. Here Cecilia is comparing
herself with the traditional heroine Isolde.

There are a number of semblances among these three stories or

three couples; that are Troilus and Criseyde, Tristan and Isolde and
Robbie and Cecilia. In the story of Tristan, Isolde too arrives late to help
her lover who terribly wondered in the war. Cecilia’s thoughtful use of
this tale foreshadows that this tale uncover her inner fury as her lover, and
she also compares him her literary forerunner that she will never see her
love alive. [Both Tristan and Robbie die at war]. Here, the wound is
traditionally associated with infidelity.

By giving all these details McEwan highlights Robbie’s innocence

as well as his honesty and loyal nature and hints his potentially scarifying
role within the novel. Here Robbie’s injury also realized as that of
Christ’s in its crucifixion. Cecilia compares herself with Griselda (AT:
329) suggests that she is doubtful about Robbie’s devotion to her love and
his character too. In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tale clerk describes
Griselda’s travails and her husband Walter, a very good person who hits
her for children, kick out her from his home when he decides to marry a
maiden. Therefore, Cecilia has compared herself as ‘patient Griselda’
(AT: 329) and Robbie then must be Walter.
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Though Cecilia has portrayed herself in her letters as Robbie’s

faithful friend and also honest close friend assuring him that she has
‘never had a moments doubt’ (AT: 197) about his innocence here her
choice of allusion gives lie to her claim. It clearly indicates her
suppressed fear that Lola’s violation will come true. Because of this she
has a break all relations with her family. Like the medieval counterparts,
Cecilia can hold her breath in the hops that her fear regarding the man to
whom she has dedicated herself utterly will prove untrue.

The reference of Troilus and Criseyde enables McEwan to create

the most destructive nature of Robbie’s passive patience. For the readers,
Chaucer’s romance echoed with the memory of them of waiting.
McEwan successfully places his work on the shoulders of this medieval
romance which is extensively concerned with the theme of agony of
delay.

Significantly, the tale of Troilus and Criseyde placed to foreground

the story of young couple Robbie and Cecilia, and both were aware of
this story also. When Robbie marched towards Dunkirk, he recollects the
Troilus allusions which were written during his imprisonment in the
letters with Cecilia. Here to mention this tale enables McEwan to reveal
Robbie’s anxieties regarding his relationship with Cecilia. It is suggesting
that Robbie is struggling to suppress this concern because he cannot take
them directly. The adaptation of Troilus indicates Robbie’s continuous
anxiety about their separation by War and also about Cecilia’s decision to
exile from her home. It is constantly starting in Robbie’s mind the story
of Troilus and Criseyde is repeating through them. Like Criseyde’s
banishment Cecilia also departed from her family. It is the peak point that
like Troilus Robbie is also suffered due to ‘prolonged wait’. The similar
to Troilus Robbie also finds himself struck in mental limbo that in one
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thought he returns and Cecilia’s love and in another the world shelter
around him.

Similarly, like Troilus tale, Tristan’s tale also alludes to this novel.
This tale is centrally concerned with the theme of repressed fear. Robbie
is under the allusion of Tristan and Troilus and thinks about the same
endings happened with Troilus and Criseyde and Tristan and Isolde. It is
well-known that the charge in Criseyde and Isolde are on their loyalty and
dishonesty. As Isolde states that Tristan’s love has refused to come, a lie
that causes the lonely man to die on the spot (AT: 352). As mentioned
Robbie worries that he will find Cecilia as transformed.

At the meeting, they kiss each other very intensively proves that
Cecilia remains faithful, more than Isolde and Criseyde. This honesty of
Cecilia helps Robbie to live alive during the retreat at Dunkirk, but he is
suspicious about both scenes and medieval figure, inhabited their earlier
letters which suggest still he fears that Cecilia cannot help but change
which it like his literary precursors.

It is very interesting to relate this story with medieval romance that

how Cecilia is representing Griselda that when Briony asks Cecilia to
meet, that time she responses that she has to ask Robbie. Briony wants to
repent and clear the mistake she has done. So Briony wants to retract and
wants to tell the truth. She even does not appeal for forgiveness, but she
wants atonement. Cecilia too does the mistake that she chooses to
abdicate responsibilities and place the burden to exculpation on her
lover’s weary shoulders. Here Cecilia resembles ‘patient Griselda’ in a
way that how Griselda refuses to find the truth about her children’s fate
or husband’s true nature. Like Griselda, Cecilia too places herself in the
 125

world of nightmares, where she must restlessly wait for others to assure
her Robbie’s honesty.

2.2.12. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The intertextual echoes and adaptations are in these two eminent

novels; McEwan’s Atonement and The Blind Assassin by Margaret
Atwood. These two novels have some major similarities which give hints
to the readers that one of them (novels) is adopted from other. It is cluster
clear that The Blind Assassin by Margaret is earlier published, and
Atonement of McEwan must be haunted her novel.

The present analysis is concerned with the readings of these two

novels and their story world, narrative engagement, character
development and presentation. The readers are mainly concerned with
stories and multiple points of view in the respective novels. These two
novels are explaining how they challenge simplistic narrative or literary
philosophies. It is about the similarities and how one text is echoing
other. These both novels have wonderful endings and interesting
philosophy because they reveal the nature of understanding and
appreciation of narrative. The analysis of these novels is primarily
concerned with their narrative imagining which is not static and unified,
but it is a multidimensional. These novels are under the some interrelated
problems and interwoven with the nature of imagination and narrative
engagement and the view point of the narratives.

2.2.13. The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

The reading of Atonement after Hartley’s novel means rereading

Hartley. It is also called the ‘influence study’. The traditional approaches
 126

find out evidence of older work in the recent work or we may the
influence of author’s predecessor. Traditionally, Milton’s influence on
Wordsworth, Keats influence on Yeats is very well-known. It is a
changed perspective of the reading that has formed. Barthes provides the
idea that every reading is a rereading, and every utterance is already said.
Whatever we are reading is ‘already read’. This view of Barthes’
connects the text with various relations, past and present.

The Go-Between is about the sensibility of a child on the edge of

sexual maturity in culture that disappoints child from facts of life. This
novel is a memoir written by Leo Colston about the past events especially
about his 13th birthday celebration. The event which has changed Leo’s
world of childhood and entered into the world of physical realities is
deeply explored. It is a journey from childhood to adulthood. The narrator
Leo holds the memoir by the key concept ‘truth’. The ‘truth’ is a story in
obsession with ‘truth’. The ‘truth’ is inevitable background of the story.
In this story, Leo is the ‘narrator’ or ‘author’ of the novel. He assumes the
author function by making the memoir a text within the text that is the
novel itself.

L. P. Hartley’s novel offers prologue and epilogues. Like the

Atonement, this novel is also centered on hero’s atonement for his
mistakes. The readers come to know in epilogue that it is about the
‘atonement’. These much similarities we can find in these two works
from prologue to epilogue, from charter to themes all are neatly
representing one another. In Hartley’s protagonist Leo Calston also, a
victim of his imagination and makes a mistake with lovers. Leo spends
fifty years and then takes his diary in the hands to write for atonement. It
is the atonement for breaking the lover’s Maria and Ted. After fifty years,
he comes to know the boy Leo was haunted by the primal scene that time
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he was on the brink of puberty. It is his journey from childhood to ad

welters and accents the fascination of by the event happened on his 13th
birthday.

The reader comes to know that how Hartley’s epilogue offers very
helpful point for discussion and its influence on McEwan’s epilogue.
Hartley’s epilogue is composed by Leo after he had written a narrative
that end’s with the news of Ted’s suicide. But McEwan’s epilogue
subverts reader’s knowledge not only about the content of the narrative
has it origin also. In both epilogues readers come to know the revelation,
in Hartley’s. Ted fathered Marin’s child is hardly surprising the readers
foresee this consequence but Leo could not. At the ending of McEwan’s
epilogue readers immediately required to know all the three preceding
parts for the consequence of the relation at the classing of epilogue.

Thus, in case of plotting, McEwan is very skillful or dissembling

and very apt to place his strategies in the narration. All these strategies of
Atonement delving Leo’s misleading his performance of ‘innocence’ as
the author, narrator replicate with the role of Briony. Both Briony and
Leo are the victims of their innocence, and both come by cause of
separation of lovers. Here, the innocence of the narrator imposes upon the
reader in order to understand the ignorance of fundamental truth that the
most readers would be unable to understand the hides of narrative. To
some extend both novels offer a detective narrative which gives them
postmodern cast. Both narrators are self-conscious, referring to most of
the others works or in their self-conscious referencing of ‘déjà vu’ or both
novels intertextually woven together. It seems that Atonement is adopted
from The Go-Between.
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McEwan too, like Hartley’s setting, sets his narrative of Part One
in country manor and both families Tallis and Maudsley belong to gentry
for generations. Both the works are clearly depicting the class barriers in
the construction of the narratives. The class is important function in the
story that Robbie Turner, the male protagonist belongs to lower class, as a
son of cleaning lady and Cecilia the female protagonist and all her family
belongs to upper middle class. The relation between Robber and upper
class love story is rightly depicted by D. H. Lawrence in Lady
Chatterley’s Lover.

McEwan has created very apt country side atmosphere under the
tradition of theme of country house setting. In Atonement, country estate
setting generates atmosphere of self-contained replica of the society
which represents the tradition. We can find such kind of atmosphere in a
number of nineteenth-century novels; such as Austen’s Mansfield Park,
Northanger Abbey, Lawrence’s Bleak House and also Tom Stoppard’s
play The Real Inspector Hound.

The foreboding atmosphere of crime is focused in Part One that

explains the erotic relationship between Cecilia Tallis and her adopted
brother Robbie Turner which suggesting the affair of Ted and Maria in
The Go-Between. As a boy of cleaning the lady, Robbie is grown up with
the Taills’ children. In Atonement, the narrator has very successfully
pointed out neither Cecilia nor Robbie interest in each other at their
earlier phase. Here, narrator enters in the mind of Robbie that: “He had
known her since they were children, and he had never looked at her”…
She was like a sister, almost invisible”. (AT: 74) At the last portion of
Part One Robbie’s entry into Tallis household described as; “His tree-
climbing pal was Leon, Cecilia was the little sister who trustingly held his
hand” (AT: 82). But on the day of Leon’s arrival the narration shifts its
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direction that the mind of Robbie is suddenly changed. He began to feel

Cecilia is producing ‘contradiction’ because at first “she was familiar like
a sister; she was exotic like a lover” (AT: 122).

Similarly, McEwan’s too starts his novel on the hot day like
twenty-three days on which The Go-Between took place. This
unseasonable heat symbolizes explosion of Eros as Robbie stated that
“can I, don’t think I can blame the heat” (AT: 80). When they return from
Cambridge into their world of childhood in which they played together as
brother and sister. That’s why Cecilia feels comfortable to strip her
underwear in front of Robbie to retrieve the Messien Vase from the
fountain. But this incident effects on the mind of Robbie. He starts to
think differently about Cecilia though she was like his sister. His
observation of Cecilia shifts from sister to a desirable woman. He goes
back to his room and starts writing a letter, his first love letter. Here this
kind of writing is an example of Barthes’ nation of writing, as an
expression of the ‘déjà vu’. Here, Robbie’s argument echoes the copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Robbie’s unconscious speaking is making him
as ‘Freudian Sleep’. It is embodied through the letter; he handovers
through Briony to Cecilia. Broiny the younger sister very surprisingly
reads letter but performs like another ‘go-between’. Briony is a narrator
of the story like Leo she is also on the brink of puberty, as a child lack of
understanding of sexual behaviour. Both Leo and Briony have mixed
feelings that are mature and immature. At one time, they are in
imagination and reality too. Their border of childhood ends and they
come to know the truth and once the truth comes it is the death of her
innocence. The primal scene in the both novels is an important factor
which is the key of their death of innocence.
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In this way, Hartley’s The Go-Between functioning as a pretext to

McEwan’s Atonement. Here, Atonement offers an interesting intertext
with Hartley’s novel, it exhibits that it is a ‘rereading’ of Hartley’s novel.
However, the reader may say that McEwan’s novel is adopted from
Hartley’s novel. It is because, his novel offering a narrative, based on
‘real life people’ told by an aging child who trapped in guilt of
‘innocence’ by witnessing a ‘primal scene’. In their novels, both the
narrators Briony and Leo are imaginative Childs. They have aspirations
to become an author, perhaps it’s a result of ‘déjà vu’ or whatever she/he
has already read. In Part One Briony imagines and farmers a story with
‘Robbie’ that “a humble woodcutter [who] saved a princess from
drowning and ended by marring her” and further she thinks about him
‘Robbie Turner the only son of humble cleaning lady and of no known
father [who] had the boldness to ask for Cecilia’s hand” (AT: 36).

Accordingly, the role of Robbie is transformed from a servant to

Cecilia’s intellectual equal which intertextually indicates The Go-
Between’s Maudsley who finds the social boundaries braked by Ted a
‘Lady Marian’s lover’. Like Hartley’s construction, Robbie owes a great
deal to Oliver Mellor, intellectually close to Robbie than Ted. Here the
notion of intertextuality forces to read the ‘influence’. As Lady
Chatterley’s Lover provides us an interesting fables, fairy tables in which
the power of education transforms the woodcutter into a lover. It is
interesting to note that a man saved ‘Woman above his class and ended
by naming her’. It makes some effects on the formation of the character
of Robbie.

Further in the presentation of the country house setting with big

houses and garden Atonement shows the classic influences of the novels
of the nineteenth century, especially D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
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Lover. All the houses resemble some similarities in their descriptions,

surroundings, people and time; such as Lawrence’s The Wrabgly Hall,
Maudsley’s (Trimingham), Hartley’s Brandham Hall and old Tallis
House of Atonement. In these three houses, the heroes are from same
classes performing the same role; they are Oliver Mellors, Ted Burger
and Robbie Turner. In this way, McEwan’s protagonist is in the tradition
of these heroes.

Another device is also performing very ingredient role in the

narratives is the letter that is the key aspect of all novels. Atonement’s
letter performs the textuality in the construction of narrative like
Hartley’s novel The Go-Between. Briony reads letters which are
addressed to her sister Cecilia the same cause with Leo, who becomes the
‘go-between’ of lovers. Leo and Briony are the massage conveners in
both novels. By reading the letter Briony too like Leo appropriates a letter
with tremendous power to damage those involved in the textual
exchange. The narrative indicates that both Briony and Leo performing
the role of ‘postman’. It is similar to Jacque Lacan’s notion, ‘The letter
always finds its address’. Like Leo, Briony too excited by reading the
letter which was included with the word ‘cunt’ a signifier generated Eros
in its reader.

Briony’s is the author of the novel, not McEwan, and she wrote
everything with her perception and documented by research. From
prologue to epilogue we are forced to reread and emphasized with ‘déjà
vu’ that is we have already read. Like Leo Briony too depicts every scene
of the novel such as Robbie’s memory of the love scene in the library.

The depiction of love scene is interwoven with other scenes, from

history or novels of nineteenth century; such as Constance’s gaze at the
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nude body of Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ursula Brangwen’s

stares at Skrebensky in The Rainbow and Gudrun Brangwen’s
observation at Gerald Crich in Women in Love representing trans-
gendering of gaze positions.

The jealousy of Briony as a child, in Part One, is replicating Leo’s

jealousy of Ted as Marin’s lover. Briony is in one scene attempts to
capture Robbie’s attention by throwing herself in the flow of water and as
the narrative engages she comes to know the sexual desires of Robbie by
the letter and Robbie’s lovemaking with Cecilia in library. These two
scenes haunted Briony to call Robbie as rapist. When the twins were
missed and all member of Tallis house hold went on search that time Lola
was raped by somebody in the night and Briony witnessed it though not
clearly but she assumed that it must be Robbie. It is because of the letter
and love the scene of library. Then Robbie was arrested and sent to War,
here Brinoy as an another comes to know in epilogue that she is the ‘go-
between’ of lovers like Leo.

The ‘unreliable narrator’ is the central force in both the novels that
as both the narrators are aware of the ‘term’ since its coinage a generation
ago by Wayne Booth. These novels are impressively impacting on
readers by their utter impression in textuality that by reading the prologue
that reader comes to knows that both narrators were known that they were
too great writers of the modern fiction. Both McEwan’s and Hartley’s
novels emerged from lost innocence of narrators by the traumatic events
in their childhood.

At last understanding the notion of ‘already read’ generates the

interwoven reading of the novels and reading a novel in web
intertextuality. In this way, Atonement is rereading of The Go-Between as
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well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Though it is a reading of earlier texts, it

misreads Keats’ Ode on Grecian Urn. In this poem, Keats persona is
offering cold comfort to the perusing ‘lover’ a figure recently read as
rapist. This is an idea similar to Robbie’s personality, he too misread by
author/narrator Briony. Here Robbie is called a ‘Grecian’ lover he knows
that his desires are transformed into Art where it cannot be diminished.
Briony as an author has fulfilled Robbie’s desire as being there with
Cecilia and making never ‘ending’ love by offering the eternal youth,
beauty and love.

It is an account of postmodern narrative of misreading that is the

central characteristic of modernism. Along with it the transforming power
of art also stressed for its effects. As in the epilogue of The Go-Between
set fifty years after the ending of the novel proper and the epilogue of
Atonement move its readers some six decades into future and its readers
present.

Thus, McEwan’s Atonement is the perfectly intertextual novel full

of other references, allusions and number of imitations; all is engaged to
create the atmosphere of the novel. Though McEwan has used number of
previous works in the creation of Atonement, it is one of the greatest
pieces of literature.

2.3. Enduring Love

McEwan’s this novel is most clearly about the survival and love in
its several forms: such as romantic, familial, idealized, obsessive, jealous.
It is used for two forces that are destruction of love and love as a
destructive force. The protagonist obsessed with John Keats’ Ode on
Grecian Urn and the novel filled up by lines of this poem and the aspect
of romantic love borrowed from various sources. The themes of the novel
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are science, delusion, the romantic tradition and relationship, conflict

between science and religion, love, obsession, storytelling and point of
view, etc. In the novel, Joe Perry is the protagonist tells the imaginary
story where McEwan adopts the narrative method of nineteenth-century
science fiction. Further, McEwan has accepted the influence of George
Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) in the case of narrative technique.
However, the patterns of argumentative dialogues of characters of the
novel are the reminiscent of absurd plays such as The Birthday Party by
Harold Pinter, Hedda Gabler (1890) by Henrik Ibsen and Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot (1955) wherein each play presenting very stylized
dialogues. In the use of letters includes the novel which gives an account
of the epistolary novels such Helen Hanif’s 84 Charing Cross Road
(1971), Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster. In this novel, some
characters also resemble the previous characters like Clarissa, which
makes the reader remember Richardson’s Clarissa. This novel is full of
religious allusions that are from also the Bible and Old Testament and
some Koran and Jewish Cabbala also. Milton’s Paradise Lost also
influences this novel, the fall of love of Jed and Clarissa that is fall from
innocence. So the theme of conflict between science and religion reminds
the reader Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Shelley’s novels are
about rationalistic, scientific mind in opposition to the values of the heart
and the domestic scene. McEwan projects some ideas from this novel in
Enduring Love. In this way, this novel is predominantly evoking the
intertextual network with Frankenstein.

Natasha Alden observes McEwan and states that McEwan:

Offers a passionate, ethical agreement against postmodern

fabulasim, reasserting the difference between historical and
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fictional forms of narrative and creating a new form of the

historiographical metafiction. (Sebastian, 2009: 69)

The above quote states that the writing of McEwan is representing some
of the historical accounts. It is through protagonist Clarissa’s secret that is
represented through the gothic story “Rampelstiltstskin” (EL: 224). It
indicates the reference of fairy tale and involving the magical possibility
of saving a child from being cruelly taken from its parents. McEwan uses
fairy tale as a background of the story.

The narrational sanity and its effects on reading of the novel

Enduring Love are creating something different kind of atmosphere in the
novel. It brings on mind the famous essay on The Turn of The Screw, of
Shoshana Felman. The article is started by citing the critical divide
caused by the 1934 essay The Ambiguity of Henry James. In that essay,
Edmund Wilson draws on Freudian theory, to suggest that the governess
in James Novella is sexually repressed, hysteric who projects her desires
in the form of ghost and possessed children. This grand-breaking evoked
two critical campus: the Freudians and anti-Freudians. Felman describes
the ambiguity at the heart of the book: this view is what critics overlook
“the very textuality of the text” (Felman, 1982: 117).

James’ novella The Turn of The Screw produces the complex

structure and readership that embedded through acts of narrating. The
writing and interpreting include the relation through a frame of the
narrative. In this novella, the history of creation and transmission of
governess’ manuscript and its oral presentation to a group of listeners is
exciting to the readers. There is also text fascination with the circulation
of letters, the content of which remain hidden from a reader. Felman sees
in the letters and central of the novel ‘a double mystery and ghosts which
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are indecipherable texts, ‘ambiguous and contradictory signifiers’

(Felman, 1982: 154) and eliciting attempts at interpretation. Felman
suggests that by looking carefully at self-reflexive elements of writing
and the storytelling and reading that we can “understand the necessity and
rhetorical functioning textual ambiguity”, not asking the question what
does the story mean? But rather ‘how does the story mean?”(Felman,
1982: 190).

Unlike The Turn of The Screw, Enduring Love has not evoked
division among its critics since Joe’s sanity is taken as irrefutable.
McEwan’s novel produces reading effect (Felman use the word 126 in
italic) which is similar to James’ text. In which a tension between
narrational believability and unreliability created that critics struggle to
resolve in their various readings. This elusive point of interpretive
reconciliation functions as missing or repressed text that is figured in
different ways written the novel itself. Like Henry’s novella Enduring
Love’s structures and motifs calling the attention towards the process of
writing and reading, especially the interpretation of putting into words of
meanings just below the surface of undertaking.

Joe has lost his faith, in ‘taking cure’— ‘A gentle fraud in my view
(EL: 99) his tale resembling a remark of psychoanalytical narrative
known as “transference” to the reader in the position of ‘analyst’ (Childs:
2007: 110). In Enduring Love, the idea of transference of Freud
resembles through Joe, who describes his experience several times in
oneiric terms. Logan’s death recalls to him recurring nightmare from his
youth in which he fail to rescue during disasters; self-appears to him to be
“the stuff of bad dreams”(EL: 147). Further, there are repressed anxieties
attached to transitory images such as ‘the flash of a white shoes and
something red’ (EL: 49) that Joe sees in library.
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Logan’s death represents an absent reality that must be signified in

order to understand the missing letters from Keats to Fanny Browne
sought by Clarissa. This letter functions as a symbol of the process of
interpretation which is central to Enduring Love. As letters in The Turn of
The Screw content its document, which may or may not exist, are never
revealed just merely guessed at by both reader and Clarissa. Like her
children letters (Undelivered letters) are too ghostly and ambiguous that
invited speculation. McEwan’s novel is a case study resembles the same
case study used by John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Fowles’ novel is a parody made up text that accounts 19th-century trial of
Lieutenant Emile de la Ronciere. He is an officer, convicted off sexual
attachment towards Marie de Morell, a 16 years old daughter of his
commanding officer. The evidence against La Ronciere includes insulting
letters, supposedly in his handwriting, but apparently forged by Marie
herself. She is wounded, according to real life, contemporary German
physician Karl Mathieu, pages of whose booklet Fowles reproduces in
translation. Marie was model of female hysteric behavior unconsciously
tricking others because of repressed sexual desires. The case study of The
French Lieutenant’s Woman is meant to help Charles Smithson she thinks
irrational game played by Sarah Woodruff, instead derived him deeper
into infatuation. Fowles’ novel embedded the narrative which resulted in
the seduction of its readership, which it achieves through a compelling
narrative believability. Similarly, McEwan’s inclusion of the appendices
provides convincing proof of Joe’s ultimate reliability as a narrator to the
utter fictitiousness of his tale.

Enduring Love’s reevaluations of ancient two cultures debate set in

the Thatcherite and Blairite Britain. In it, prominent experiences of
cultural depression and disparity demand new forms of creative thinking
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and the unique combination of scientific and literary values. This novel
conveys/reflects a new cultural outlook, creatively reimagining the
modern and postmodern ideas of truth and progress.

The paper is from ‘The British Review of Psychiatry’ as an exact

source of the novel. The paper “A homo-erotic obsession with religious
overtones: a clinical variant of de Clerambault’s syndrome” a source of
the novel is a document in narration. Here by the use of this paper
McEwan writes Enduring Love as a 'drawings upon recent ideas from the
cognitive science interdisciplinary exploring the representation of
consciousness’. The novel is focusing upon overlapping manifestation of
Theory of Mind and ranging from altruism to violent pathology. He uses
the techniques; such as intertextuality, the use of paratexts and
juxtaposition of scientific and literary discourser in his novel. McEwan
constructs his novel as Theory of Mind, creating a demanding and
appealing reading experience, which mirrors the doubt and uncertainty of
characters, as they strive to understand each other’s minds. Theory of
Mind is a phrase used by Premack and Woodruff in their extensive
research in 1978 (Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness).

McEwan’s deep interest which is not to tell us about human nature,

which is central them of the novel. Notably, Enduring Love explores and
exploits the unique potentials of literary narrative to represent our intense
desire to engage with other minds. It highlights the fact that we are
designed by nature to read and misread minds, as well as, capacity of the
novel to communicate the races, feel of human experience in a way that
clues scientific discourse. The use of appendices is functioning within the
disclosures to validate the preceding narrative and Joe’s narrational
reliability, recalling the slippery nature of the genre, the narrative
function, and ‘truth’. Two appendices of the novel function and embodies
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an authorizing narrative. Primarily they are used as paratexts that are

conspicuous. It is the powerful narrative technique of McEwan. These
appendices explicitly signal his interest in science and its use in literary
narrative. The appendices in the novel suggest the reader how to respond
in a particular way.

Enduring Love is a story representing a complex phenomenon of

mind reading and unique power of literature to capture the secret
workings of the mind, in a way that denies scientific discourses. In this
novel McEwan’s prime concern are the lives of Joe Rose and his wife
Clarissa, which articulate that we actually need a narrative to make sense
of experience. McEwan’s prime aim is to explore the space of the
complex and largely unnoticed dynamics. That exists when human beings
naturally engage with each. Enduring Love indicates a new literary trend
and a new kind of novel representative of 1990’s a period labeled the
‘Decode of the Brain” (Richardson, 2001: 181). Nowadays, the
consciousness is pertained to a ‘Holy Grail of science and philosophy’
(Neo, 2004: xi). It is interesting to notice that how McEwan is interested
in science or scientific discourse. And how this discourse tells us about
human nature and constructs this novel as a ‘Theory of Mind’.

The use of Theory of Mind is related to the mind reading. It is a

concept in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This concept is
intended to describe human beings’ commonsense, especially
unconscious ability. It is being used to explain and predict the mental
states, thoughts, feelings, intentions, desires and goals of others, based on
their observable behaviour. McEwan uses novel as a vehicle to explain
physiological perplexities for instance, understanding of other people.
McEwan’s novel appeals to the readers’ minds because of its explicit
focus on minds engagement with other minds. This evokes the reader to
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comprehend and judge fictional minds as we have in real life. The people
enjoy fictional experiences because of it they exercise their mind reading
capabilities: people like to imagine what others are thinking. This work of
McEwan necessarily engages with misunderstanding capacities, as
Blackey Vermeule believes that novel ‘play on our need to fathom the
deepest motivations of other peoples’ (Vermeul, 2010: 62). Enduring
Love emphasizes on the fundamental human desire to understand others.
James Phelan states “narratives typically ask their readers to judge
characters” (Phelman, 2009: 311).

McEwan’s novel uses the techniques of intertextuality in

construction of the characterization. The novel uses science as a paratext.
Most clearly this novel works on the theory mind and opens the ways
how mind interprets each other.

McEwan’s use of first person narration and concentrate

focalization invite the reader to question the reliability of the narrator,
which constructing conspicuous perspective angle to the discourse that
challenges to the reader to work hard. This discourse mode informs the
reader to mirror the activity of interacting with minds of Jed Parry’s, as
well as each other’s mind.

This novel is predominantly talking about recent developments in

the cognitive science and paratexting scientific discourse, illuminate ideas
regarding human consciousness in a text. It is a book about the mind and
everyday psychologically regular mind, consciously and unconsciously
try to interpret other thoughts based on observation. It is a text
constructed with Theory of Mind impacting on our reading experiences.
Theory of Mind is the innate feature of our minds without it the activity of
novel reading is impossible. Alan Palmer explains “readers of novels
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have to use their theory of mind in order to try to follow the workings of
character’s mind. Otherwise, they will lose the plot” (Palmer, 2009: 293).

Lisa Zunshine examined that the reader percepts the hidden mental
state of fictional characters by “deliver a rich stimulation to the cognitive
adaptations constituting our Theory of Mind” (Zunshine, 2007: 195). In
Why we ReadNovels? Zunshineargues the key reason the reader desires
fiction is ‘engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind
reading capacity’ (Zunshine, 2006: 4). And novels exist because of our
active Theory of Mind (5). In this way, novel is an experience of an
alternative self in a world which is infinitely appealing and also
necessary. McEwan explores and exploits our mind-reading capacities in
a number ways in this novel by using textual, as well as intertextual
signals. Enduring Love explicitly focuses on minds’ engaging with other
minds and its effect on the reading experience is tremendously exploring
how we interpret other minds.

Enduring Love uses the flexibility in its form to find out different
manifestations of our Theory of Mind. It is mainly emphasizing the love
altruism and passionate psychotic disorder i.e. –de Clerambault’s
Syndrome where love becomes obsessive. Here, the reader is invited to
understand the abstract feeling ‘love’. In this regard, McEwan uses
‘LOVE IS A JOURNEY’ as a metaphor. This understanding of love
implicitly and explicitly goes towards the Romantic poet John Keats. It
shows the two impacts of love imaginative and emotional which is a
central to our subjective experience of the world. This kind of narrative
technique is creating a structured cognitive model that guiding our
responsive to the novel. The title of the novel ‘enduring’ itself is
polysemic that is both gerent and adjective. It signifies lasting and
suffering, representing our extraordinary reading of others minds. Theory
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of the mind is fundamental to our successful understanding of society and

survival. McEwan is dramatically presenting this theory which is the best
way to understand others. As Darwin said “instincts are not always
perfect and are liable to mistakes” (Darwin, 1998: 186), making our
Theory of Mind in certain instance which is somewhat an ‘ambiguous
gift’ (Lodge, 2002: 41).

Since its beginning, the novel is focusing on the dynamic

consciousness of the protagonist Joe Rose. McEwan skillfully represents
Joe to understand others’ minds; in particular it is the antithesis of the
scientific mind- (the pathological deluded Joe Parry). Joe becomes well
aware of Parry as a threat; end the novel explodes his commitment to
understanding Parry’s impaired mind, presenting Joe’s consciousness as
an active, bodily process. McEwan explores two kinds of loves
psychologically irregular and modern. The first is whose concept of love
is shocking deviation from of Keats Romantic love which intertextually
referred throughout the novel. On the other hand, modern manifestation
of love presented by Joe and Clarissa’s happy marriage. Through, this
contrasting characterization Enduring Love suggests the puzzle of
everyday human perception.

The beginning of the novel Enduring Love is dramatic. The

opening operates to establish novel’s interest in the cognitive process.
And our automatic understanding of mental states to fictional minds. The
ballooning accident is the starting scene of the novel where a man dies by
falling from a hot-air balloon while saving the child that triggers Joe
Parry’s delusion. This scene functions as a mind metaphor for the mind as
embodied and extended for the concepts of prediction, problem solving
and survival play in the novel. The runaway balloon, risking child’s life
depicts an acutely visual representation of minds working together. It
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indicates Darwin’s metaphor of Man’s ‘struggle for existence’ and

‘dependence of one being on another” (Darwin, 1998: 50). The
ballooning disaster is the representation of the theory of mind which
manifests the love, love altruism, and love as pathology. The dramatic
opening of the novel constructed the complete story of Joe which
reflecting Mark Turner’s idea of ‘story [as] as a basic principle of mind’
(Turner, 1998: vii).

McEwan works on mind’s interaction with other minds within the

context of the physical world. From an evolutionary perspective, the
runaway hot air balloon represents the dangers of survivals posed by the
environment. It is the survival of the child caught in a hot air balloon.
McEwan calls it as ‘size of a house (EL: 8) and ‘towering… best’ (EL: 9)
which represent subtle Biblical echoes. McEwan depicts the holding of
the balloon rope ‘like Sunday bellringers’ (EL: 13). Here this scene is
indicating the fusion of body and mind of the running men which are
following together. This scene is creating a visual image of mind and
body working together.

The beginning of Enduring Love creates McEwan’s belief in the

power of literary narrative to communicate consciousness and the
intensity of experience. This sense clearly shows the potential of the
novel to exhibit the skilled response to the other's mind. In the first part,
McEwan describes it ‘synchronous moments’ (EL: 18), suggesting that
each man is as immersed in the mental world as much as in the physical
world of each other. The representation of Joe’s consciousness merges his
actions with his thoughts: ‘We pulled the basket to the ground’ (EL: 11);
“I heard what was coming two seconds before it reached us” (EL: 12),
“My first impulse was to hang on in order to keep the balloon weight
down” (EL: 13). All of these references suggesting that perception
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processes are hybrid because the consciousness is both internal and

external. This consciousness is reflecting Adam Zeman’s view on the
purpose of consciousness. He defines it to “help us to select appropriate
actions in an unpredicted world” (Zeman, 2002: 346). This early climatic
scene in the discourse where Joe must makes ‘instant calculations’ (EL:
13) of environmental events to protect his life foreshadows. Joe predicts
the mind of Parry in order to understand him better to defend himself.
Enduring Love expresses in a dramatic manner the basic fact that in life
we must actively make predictions about others to encourage our
survival.

The opening of the novel is very complex which puts the reader in
the state of confusion and reflecting role of undertaking which indicating
the state of mind of psychologist William James’s national of the “barrier
of belonging to foddering personal minds” (James, 1890: 226). As they
actively try to make sense of Joe, questioning his reliability as a narrator.
The discourse of the novel places a sustained emphasis on the ‘universal
[and] genetically inscribed’ (EL: 4) roles of facial and bodily expressions
in revealing mental states. McEwan’s concentrated focalization privileges
the reader to see inside Joe’s mind, and it invites the order to analyses
Parry just as Joe does, as we would if this were real life and fiction. In
this instance when Parry stares at Joe, Joe radically misinterprets Perry’s
expressions and the reader is promoted by Joe’s diction ‘the stranger’s
clear, blue eyes held mind’(EL: 20). Joe closely observes Perry’s
physicality attributes; he is:

…tall and lean… he loved fit…. His bones firmly out of

him… the cheek bones were… tightly and high ridged….
His appearance was striking… but the voice… was feeble
and hesitant… (EL: 24).
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Enduring Love is manifesting various types of love which are

predominantly influenced by tradition. In the novel, three major types of
love are highlighted through the characters. They are Perry’s delusional
love, Joe Logon’s altruistic love. In the case of Perry the love is
delusional what exactly he wants that he loves Joe. In the gradual
development of the scene, the reader comes to how that Perry’s love is
homosexual, and he is giving religious frame to his love. He is expressing
love and possessing that Joe must love only with him. It is a distinct kind
of love McEwan creates though the story which lighting erotomania. The
love Clarissa of and Joe is the Romantic love representing Fanny
Browne’ love relationship with John Keats.

Ian McEwan’s novel presents a bizarre and compelling story of

delusion and obsession within tightly hint are of intertextuality. McEwan
adopts a literary history (life-stories of the Romantic poet John Keats and
William Wordsworth) as well as facts of sciences, medicine, of
psychopathology to the embodiment of narrative. The figure of Romantic
poet John Keats is referred from the beginning which seems to be central
textuality of the text, and it is one of the pivotal themes of the novel. The
use of romantic ideology is appositional theme with scientific rationalism.
One of the main characters Clarissa obsessed with Keats poetry and
became Keats’ scholar. She quotes famous lines from Ode On Grecian
Urn ‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty’. Probably for Clarissa beauty is
ultimate criteria of truth as it was for Keats. The misunderstandings of
Clarissa and Joe Rose are prove to be attacked at the end that are failed to
stand the test of challenging and menacing circumstances of real life.

Fanny’s spiritual love for Keats is the background and subplot of

the novel Enduring Love. It provides a commentary on love and becomes
the benchmark against different kinds of love featuring the novel.
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Fanny’s love is very innocent and distanced by 200 years belonging to the
imaginary both parallels and comments on what at first is Clarissa’s and
Joe’s passionate love, then the fading love under strain as well as on
Parry’s morbid obsession that the parody of love which will finally
invade couple’s lives and encroach their happiness. Clarissa’s and Joe’s
daily existence and their love caught in the gears of artificiality of Jed
Parry’s sick obsession.

What has started in the foregrounded artificiality ends in truth, it

echoing Clarissa’s statement in Chapter 19 when she refers famous
episode of Keats being put down by the arrogant Wordsworth : ‘It isn’t
true, but it tells the truth’ (EL: 169). In this way, McEwan’s using
medical discourse as a psychological condition and erotic relationship
both the characters bring to mind Mitchel Foucault’s historicization of
medical discourse in its relation to sexuality. But the fact is that the
medical discourse with rationalism, scientific objectivity and finality is
made up of Foucauldian lines in order to suggest that all the discourses
including scientific are ‘artificial’. The artificiality of scientific discourse
might indicate that art is more honest, is more capable of reading
truthfulness than the objective discourse of science. In this way, this
process is returns toward Renaissance debate between poetry and history.

Finally, we can evaluate that McEwan is using two different

intertexts in the novel. One is artistic intertext [Keats’ poem] that is a real
one, and the others are scientific discourse. So we give more credence to
the real one that is an artistic one highlighting ‘reality value’ of the two
intertexts produces for the ‘truth of beauty’ over the ‘truth of science’. In
this way, Enduring Love does not purely represents romantic poetry
neither does it play with or parody its conventions. It simply places in the
context as a superior against rationalism that is forced in 19th century
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romantic text. On the other hand, it accepts romantic poetry on its terms
such it without parody, refraction and trans-contextualization. By
excessive use of intertextuality that is critical practice fooling the reader
with the made-up of text and suggesting that like romantic poetry truth
can be attained through beauty. McEwan starting here that is ‘return to
basics’ which abandoning the ironic and relativistic strategies of
postmodernism and even return to textual autonomy and superiority of
individual work of art over the postmodern blurring of boundaries of
which intersexuality is prime exponent.

Scientific Influence of American Biological E.O. Wilson is

referred in the novel. E.O. Wilson has developed the theory of ‘genre
culture-co-evolution’ in which he argues that human nature and social
behavior are shaped by evolutions. This view of Wilson rightly observed
in the novel that McEwan’s protagonist shaped this opinion when he
judges certain modes of behaviour and actions according their biological
roots. Wilson is even quoted in debate on principles both Joe and his
wife. It is clear that the novel criticizes Joe’s fundamental rationalism,
and the ending of the novel “[holds] out hope for a re-rapprochement
between science and humanities”. To these references this novel indicates
that writers of fiction and scientists are not as far apart as it seems.
McEwan explains because they have one thing in common that is both
have eagerness to explain mysteries of life and human nature. It is cleared
in one of the interviews, McEwan said in an interview that “As a novelist
I suppose that one of my central concerns is the investigation of human
nature, and the biological materialism of Darwin fascinated me because
it’s opened up. So much in the way of explanation […] nation of that
thinking biologically”. (web)
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Clarissa compared the falling Logan to a line from John Milton’s

Paradise Lost that is ‘Hurled headlong flaming from ‘ethereal sky’’ (EL:
29). McEwan uses of allusion are a metaphor to the relationship of
Clarissa and Joe. Meanwhile, Clarissa writes an abstract love letter to Joe
that they are well off and mostly content with their lines. On the day,
when John Logan fell down from the sky, Clarissa and Joe fallen from the
paradise of their love. McEwan manipulates the narrative with the exact
allusion ‘fallen’ from Milton. Like Adam and Eve expelled from the
Garden of Eden Clarissa and Joe finds themselves with lost innocence in
a nightmarish world.

Ian McEwan’s characters do not have faith in God except mad

stalker Perry who suffering from a delusional syndrome. In the novel, the
characters are not at any theological positions in Churches. On the other
hand, none emphasizes conflicts between rational, emotional and even
spiritual behaviours as characters search for enduring love in postmodern
culture.

The novel’s conflicts between pathology and rationality, the

theories of evolutionary psychology and Romantic institutions about truth
and beauty, between linear narration and postmodern fragmentation, all
show difficulties in finding adequate and sufficient causes for ‘enduring
love’. Literary critic Jonathan Greenberger argues that McEwan’s novel
represents a series of interrelated conflict, literary and religious
worldviews. Greenberg states that “despite its multifaceted critique of
Neo-Darwinism, Enduring Love does in fact whole out hope for a
rapprochement between sciences and the humanities” (web).

Enduring Love is a novel about endurance and love in several

forms and survival. Here in the novel love is romantic, familial, idealized,
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obsessive and jealous. The love is the central factor of the novel which
home two forces that are destructive of love and about love as a
destructive force.

Enduring love is a novel with one narrator but is a story with three
central protagonists who all have a different character starting of human
reality. Joe Rose is a rationalist who things science reveals the facts about
existence and the universe. Though he might not disagree with this
standpoint, his partner Clarissa Mellon feels that art, beauty and
happiness, not facts are at the central of people’s relationships and that
these are the important things that underpin life and love. Jed Parry
believed that God underpins reality. Three of them thus begin form three
different premised: cognition, emotion and faith. It is worth notable that
these three perspectives are also related to a significant period of Western
cultural history. The view that God was at the center of life was
‘inconstable’ in Europe up to the Renaissance. After that through the
influence of art and classical civilization, human interests become more
important: since 18th century Enlightenment, rationalism and science have
dominated our understanding of the world, though the Romantic period at
the turn of 19th century reasserted the importance of nature, emotion and
imagination.

McEwan’s incorporation of Jed’s religious view-point is presented

through religious allusions, especially, in its opening scenes. These
allusions are parallels with Eden and Fall, from the first book of Bible,
are suggested. It is also there, however, in small parallels both suffering
and sacrifice of the Jesus and that of Joe and John Logan. Each aspect
also has its literary connections with in the novel in 19th century narrative
turn in science discussed by Joe (EL: 48-49) in the reference to classical
search for Keats missing letters and in the allusion of John Milton’s 17th
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century epic poem of the fall, Paradise Lost (While first chapter
concludes with ‘I’ we never seen such a terrible thing as that falling
man’(EL: 16) a direct quotation from Paradise lost follows shortly :
“Hurled headlong flaming from the Ethereal Sky” (EL:29).

Symbolically, this novel manifests the romantic love which is itself

a contested phenomenon. Aspect of love is nothing but a universal
feeling, especially to revolutionary scientist and protagonist Joe Rose, for
him love is not a constant fact of life but it is a Western cultural concept
that should be historicized or it is evident in all societies. For example,
Morton Hunt states in The Natural History of Love that is:

A pattern of love that is mostly western, strongly Anglo-

Saxon and relatively new on earth. Western love, in a
manner scarcely to be found in earlier history attempts to
combine social outlet, affection friendship and the
procreative familial functions, all in a single relationship
(Hunt, 1959:342).

Therefore, an understanding of love in Western countries is under

the influence of Romantic poetry, especially the poets like John Keats.
Importantly, to note that the love has become measure key of individual’s
happiness and pervasive part of the popular culture, in which
metaphorical register has been shifted from ‘my love is like a red, read
rose’ one origin of Joe’s name to kinds of (serval) dependency. ‘Love is
the Drug” and ‘Addiction to Love.’ At one point, Joe thinks about
drinking drugs and mind altering substance which he does not explicitly
link to love. It appears to have similarity and have a beneficent effect but
can also lead to addiction and worse. McEwan writes ‘these are the
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consequences of simple abuse which flow, as scarcely as claret from a

bottle, out of human whenever, defied of character’ (EL: 187).

McEwan predominantly uses the story or relationship between

John Keats and William Wordsworth as a parallel story with the
relationship between Joe Rose and Jed Parry. Metaphorically McEwan
uses this relationship in the narrative which gives a hint of Keats meeting
with Wordsworth in Dec. 1817 it is reflected particularly in the novel in
Chapter 19. McEwan very skillfully placing the story of imminent
personalities of the Romantic period, especially he is fascinated by the
philosophy of John Keats and his literature. In this way, we can recognize
that Keats poetry impacting on the gradual development of the novel.
Keats’ Odes have the same.” which are closely reflected in Enduring
Love. The major themes of Odes are the difference between transient and
the permanent, the inextricable ties between second-line and pain,
contrasts and similarities between nature and art, knowledge and
imagination. Particularly in McEwan’s use the as a hypertext or what
theorists call it the allusion. Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn and Endymion
are reflected in the novel particularly on the page 168, Chapter No. 19.
Keats’ poem is representing contrast life with its trial leading only to
death and also demonstrating the permanent beauty in art that is
represented by the figures on the urn. Further the textual connections of
the poem Endymion with its famous line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy
forever” used by McEwan in the views of the protagonist. At the close
reading of Enduring Love the reader can recognize that Jed’s assertion in
his letter that “Faith is joy’ (EL: 245). Both these lines give a different
value linked with novel’s love triangle. Joe is in search of truth though he
is aware of the impossibility of objectivity. Clarissa, a Keats scholar
trusts on Keats’ view of love and beauty and the joy that endure. Keats
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wrote on 13 October, 1819 letters to Fanny that in which he wrote “Love

is my religion”. In the same way, McEwan’s character Jed philosophize
that ‘faith is religion’ means that for him the joy is to be found in faith.

The textual connection between Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn and

Enduring Love are very easy to trace. In Keats’ phrase ‘Forever will thou
love’ there is also, for example, the second-line reference to the urn as a
‘Foster-child,’ bringing to mind Joe and Clarissa’s adoption of a child.
Similarly many phrases are used in the novel striking the reader a poem
Endymion. McEwan‘s novel as resembling the same theme “…If this
early love has the power to make Men’s being mortal immortal…” (5).

Interestingly we come to know the story used in Keats’ poem of

Greek Myth of Endymion. This poem is an allegory of the search for love
based on the Greek Myth, which tells the story of moon Goddess,
Cynthia, who falls in love with a shepherd boy Endymion. She is so
infatuated by his beauty and because of that she is descended from
heaven. In the story Endymion is begged with youth, sleep and
immortality by the God so he can dream forever. This poem is a fine
example of Keats’ ability to luxuriate in sensuous descriptions.

In this way, Keats is not only renowned for his poetry but also for
his letters in literature. In the same way, Clarissa’s believe “love that did
not find its expression in a letter was not perfect” (EL: 7). It is to be
considered in this light that it would be impossible to resolve what is
‘Perfect love’ it might be other that God’s. This is perfectly alluding that
the story of John Keats and Fanny Browne (the girl next door) one of the
well-known love affair in letters. It was a relationship in which Keats
greatly engaged because he felt that his love was unrequited. This story
reader can relate with love affair of Jed and Joe in which Jed seeks to
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have with Joe through his 1000 letters. There is a similarity between the
ends of John Keats and Jed Parry. Keats died by the disease of
tuberculosis and Jed died by a very different cried of illness. Joe’s intense
scanning of these letters for clue about Jed is meant directly to parallel
Carissa’s literal analysis of Keats. Clarissa’s search of the last unset letter
from Keats to Fanny finds its correlative in final letter of Enduring Love,
which is an unsent letter (last letter in the novel) from Parry declaring his
undying love for Joe. There are some similarities between Jed’s and
Keat’s letters one of them is ‘You will call this madness’ (May 1820)
“Ask yourself my love whether you are not very circle to have so
untrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom” (1st July, 1819), “I cannot
exists without you – I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again -
my life seems to stop three – I see no further. You have absorbed me”
(13th October, 1819) ‘Do not live as if I was not existing…. You must be
mine to die upon the rack if I want you” (May 1820).

On the aspect of evolutionary science McEwan indebted to a

number of authors, and books which he has given in acknowledgement
Such as E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature (1984), Steven Pinker’s The
Language Instinet (1994), Antaria Damasio’s Descartes Error :Emotion,
Reason and the Human Brain (1994), Robert Wright’s The Moral
Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1995),Walter
Bodmer and Robert [sic] Mick’s The Book of Man : The Human Genome
Project and the Quest to Discover our Genetic Heritage (1995) (EL:
247). All these books are closely scrutinized in the novel Enduring Love.
This novel explores two areas: science and literature which have principle
interest in studying it. McEwan quotes his Appendix I P. 242. Further the
theme of “erotomania” which is described by Mullen and Pathe in The
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Pathological Extention of Love as an “autistic mode of being”. For

instance in one of the examples given in the article is about a man who:

Doggedly pursued his ‘God chosen bride’ over several years. His
other interests were subordinated. He created chars for the objects of his
affections, put the lines of others in danger, and totally destroyed the
fabric of his own life, culminating in long, term incarceration (Mullen
and Pethe, 1994: ).

Impact of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is centurial aspect of the

novel. McEwan is greatly under the influence of Darwin’s ideology or
theory. McEwan works on it and extends it to psychological evolution.
McEwan allusively develops the ideas of Darwin in his book or
sometimes he uses them as ingredient part of his characters. He uses
Darwin’s understanding about human emotions that “…Darwin’s
contention that the many expressions of emotion in human universal
genetically inscribed…” (EL: 4).

In this way, this novel is one example of intertextual novel we

come to know the number of other references from poetry to science and
from science to religion. All these reference are skillfully used in the
development of the novel.

2.4. The Child In Time

The Child in Time deals with a very ‘McEwanesque’ theme in

which the protagonist’s life irrevocably changes with a single act, not of
his own doing. In this case, Stephen Lewis, a successful children’s writer
and his three years old daughter Kate disappears one Saturday morning
when they were at grocery shop. His attention is averted for less than a
minute, and when he looks up again, she has been disappeared. The
extraordinary impact of the events is leading to the horrific moment and
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how the rhythm of everyday life changes for everybody and he and his
wife Julia become the structure on which the narrative is based. The
opening of the novel suggests three novel’s opening in the same
presentation such as Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1860-61),
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and George Orwell’s 1984
(1949). Here, in this novel each chapter is prefaced by quotation from a
fictitious text The Authorized Childcare Handbook. The themes of the
novel are time, science and art comparable with a short story The Time
Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells. As a political satire this novel recalls the
first part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) where Swift
makes the satire of the court of Queen Anna and here McEwan does it on
contemporary politics of Margaret Thatcher. This novel is mainly about
stories of boys’ adventures which hints reader the stories of J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pen (1904), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), R.M.
Ballantyne’s The Coral Island and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
(1954). In this novel some quotes are from T.S. Eliot’s poem Four
Quartets (1944) especially from the first part (Burnt Norton) here how
McEwan picks Eliot’s ideas of ‘Time’ and reinterprets in the novel. The
female protagonist of this novel Mrs. Lewis is compared with D.H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) protagonist Mrs. Gertrude, on the
masculine characteristics of these two women and their early
disappointment in their relationship with their lovers. In this novel ‘nature
of time’ is playing the central factor which explores so many work of arts
in case of time such as A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen
Hawking which gives theoretical ideas about time which are
experimented in the novel with new scientific theories about time. In this
way some of the other influences that are reader is recollecting some
poems about time which give some similarities in presentation of time
such as Sonnet 60 of Shakespeare, To His Coy Mistress by Andrew
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Marvell, When I Have Fears by John Keats, Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley,

Remember by Christiana Rossetti, Learns By Ted Hughes, respectively.
Thus, this novel explores the dark sides of parenting and humanity by an
author compared to Dickens, Lawrence, and Woolf. In this way, this
novel is presenting very huge network for intertextual analysis.

In the Third Chapter of novel the content of British literary

response to modernity, especially those of the poet Philip Larkin and poet
and critic Donald Davie clearly reflected. It is stated through Stephan’s
positivity in the early stages of the narrative. At this stage, his agency is
minimal, epitomized by his half-hearted engagement with the Child Care
Sub-Committee. The novel itself is a comment on the sociopolitical
malaise as on Stephan’s lethargy, a wider state of affairs that engenders
the Larkinsque misanthropy:

The audience, however, brought him to bouts of delirious

misanthropy. It was the doggish eagerness to please the host
and to be pleased by him, their readiness to applaud and
cheer on command and wave plastic pennants bearing the
show’s slogan….The faces tilted into the studio lights were
those of adults, parents, but the wide open expressions were
those of children watching a tea-time party conjure (CT:
134-35).

Journey of the train has a great tradition in English literature

especially in poetry where they serve to define a certain sense of the
nation for example in Edward Thomas’s Alderstrop, Auden’s Night Mail
Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings Auden & Larkin are seeming lie
behind the third chapter of the novel. Larkin’s description of English
landscape; that it is about heterogeneous confusion about industrial,
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suburban, postindustrial and postindustrial reflected for the first time in

English poetry both the bare fact of that landscape and the manner in
which we take its degradation for granted. McEwan’s description of
landscape is clearly in the tradition of Larkin. Infected by Larkinesque
misanthropy, Stephan shuts himself away from other ‘customers’ in a
first-class compartment.

McEwan description of land and London city is:

They ran along near gardens of Victorian terraces whose

back additions offered glimpses through open doors into
kitchens, past Edwardian and prewar semis, and then they
were threading through suburbs, southwards then eastwards,
past encampments of minute, new houses with dirty, well-
thumbed scraps of the country in between. The train slowed
over tangle of junctions and shuddered to a halt. In the
abrupt, expectant silence exuded by railway lines, he
realized how impatient he was to arrive. They had stopped
by a new housing estate of raw undersized semidetached
houses, starter homes for first-time buyers. The front gardens
were still rutted earth out the back, fluttering white
happiness proclaimed from diagrammatic, metal trees
surrender to a new life. Two infants, hand in the land
staggered beneath the washing and waned at the train.
Shortly before his stop it began to rain (CT: 50).

The above passage gives an account of Victorian setting which resembles

the description in Larkin’s poem The White Sun Weddings. Paul Edwards
quotes in his article:
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We ran behind the backs of houses the next town, new and
wonder-script. Approached with areas of dismantled cars…
how fields were building plots... And as the tightened brakes
took hold, there swelled. A sense of falling, like an arrow-
shower, sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. (Paul,
1995: 50).

It is clear that Larkin’s poem is not simply about landscape, but it’s
about weddings and mixed values and emotions that marriages (by
implication of parenthood’s) indicate. His poems are representing a
triumph over the small minded misanthropy shown in the description of
wedding parties themselves. And that triumph is expressed through
pastorals. It is interesting to note that how McEwan is representing
Larkin’s words.

McEwan says ‘now fields were building plots’ in the description of

the city which represents the style of Larkin. Further, some of the
McEwan’s depictions are exhibiting Dani Donald’s comments on the
starting lines of Larkin.

I thought of London spread out in the sun,

Its postal districts packed like sequences of wheat (Web).
Davie commenting on the above lines and quotes that:
…The collision between the organisms of wheat and rigidity
of “postal district” is calculated. It is human pathos of the
many weddings he has seen from the train which spills over
to sanctify for the poet, the postal district of the London, the
train destination, the human values suffuses the abstractly
schematized with the grace of organic fertility (Thomas
Hardy and British Poetry, 1973: 66).
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Here we come to know many similarities such as the image of rain

which evoking the dreariness of the wet day indoor with bored children,
playing its part in the natural cycle which culminates its groan wheat.
Like Larkin, McEwan too assimilates natural to the human in the passage
quoted above, in his image of metal trees bearing white happiness. This
assimilation is a process that, in its accurate replication of the condition
of post war. England ( the reduction of the landscape which is other than
human) Davie protest against, understandably, I think in some of his
poems Larkin gives human qualities to nature especially English land.
McEwan’s metal trees representing (proclaiming) a surrender to the
exigencies of fertility of the species, are themselves a sardonic emblem
of what Davie is objecting to the ‘natural’ image and nature it-self ,
become ‘abstractly schematized’ to fit the schematization of our human
lives; and we and nature both suffer the diminishment on that account.
McEwan novel highlight the description that it is his countryside through
which Stephan walks after leaving the train is with hypermarkets, car
parks and motorways. He describes it ‘Real open country’ is a concrete
track traversing symmetrical conifer plantations. The closest thing to an
animal (a counterpart to metal trees) a “gray beast languidly lifting its
blunt, heavy head with steady purr is a nodding donkey engine pumping
at a small oil well…” (CT: 51).

The perspective denied from Davie is about what might be most

depressing about this is Stephan’s acquiescence in the substitution of this
landscape for less schematized land that preceded it. Stephan feels here
‘light hearted’ because he is in open country. The diminishment distresses
McEwan it is about human not solely environmental. Stephan is in very
pathetic condition that he is losing a more nourishing sense of wonder
rather than the sense provided by industrial environment, “The flashing
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parallax as one row (of the geometrically arrayed conifers) cedes to the
next a pleasing effect…” (CT: 52). We can connect this with Stephan’s
agreement in the political fraud of the child care commission on which he
serves. Despite his belief, he is capable of simply shrugging his shoulders
& the whole business, so impoverished is his political expectations in this
England.

The novel The Child In Time alerts the reader that how there is the
larger scope of the novel and its central ideas. In the novel the reader
comes to know that the novel is not about ‘a child’ but ‘the child’ in any
human being especially in any adult such as in the novel Charles who
becomes child again. The protagonist Stephen is also a child. The
childhood and the child are the central themes of the novel it accounts
various aspects childhood and also harshly comment on the society,
politics and government. The reality of London society presented through
child beggars, the governments committees on children. Some of the
other subthemes are also interwoven such as procreation nurturing,
parenting of children and the Authorised Childcare Handbook. Another
central factor of the novel that is ‘time’ which binds together all
children’s or they are set in time such as time past, present and future. On
the other hand the mysteries of time, the overlap of time, the relationship
of children to time, the meaning of time for children and adults they
become, the effect of passing time on children, the freezing of time when
a child remains ever the age at which she disappears.

McEwan creates unique amalgamation of the old and new. He says

in an interview that, “my prose tended to remain private and political
(could exist) together. This novel is to some extent a fulfillment of an
ambition” (Smith: 69). McEwan consistently explores duplicitous and
inefficient government he explores some political examinations with
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some of his major ideas: the power of sustaining relationship, regression

as a means of escape, the strength of female, the detrimental effects of
contemporary society on its individuals.

As a well-known contemporary author McEwan is mainly

concerned with historical, political and social issues and their impacts on
individual identity. The issue of politics is dominating in this novel, and
this theme has haunted all his novels. His novels providing “cultural
debates and moral outcries”(Gres:1) with political chaos of contemporary
society, social mentalities and taboos, weakness and faults of individuals
which are leading his and her exile which is either imposed, self-imposed
or emotional and sometime physical. Especially McEwan’s novels are
exploration of individuals, society and relationships and society within
both a claustrophobic private sphere and the public one. The protagonists
of McEwan’s novels are always placed in an unfamiliar word where they
feel isolated, and they are forced to look inwards.

This novel is moving around the political ideologies of 1980’s

Britan. In a different ways McEwan novel exploring the trauma, the
emotional isolation, childhood and exploring the inner states and
transformation of characters experiencing the traumatic events. HoiJense
states that McEwan fiction as a result of “the demise of their accused
world the characters are isolated within internal conflicts and they are
involuntarily forced to reassess their lives, their existence and their
relationship with the people they love” (11).

Theme of family of Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) is

driving the plot of McEwan’s The Child In Time (1987). These two
novels are written during the critical condition of the state where
relationship of state and individual are so artificial. They are constantly
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portraying the conventional nuclear family influence of public state on

private family structure and community can act like family. Orwell’s
novel was published in 1935 before the introduction of welfare state
guaranteed universal minimum standards of living and McEwan’s novel
in 1987 at a time when Thatcherite individualism had once again become
key point. It is sighted that both texts are presenting the family as a solid
institution on which one can depend on in these time of crises Paul
Edward states that in The Child In Time ‘only through a strong sense of
family unity can any political opposition become possible’ (Paul, 1995:
55). Both texts are moving around the idea of a ‘family’ which is
involving not only a way of surviving but also as a means to political
changes.

The two representative protagonists (female) Dorothy and Julie are

right to comparison. Here the reader gets some ideas from the character
Dorothy that how Kate to some extent under the influence. For example
to overcome from the suffering through familial support network is a
romantic vision, character are often ignoring the pain and physical
hardship of Dorothy’s experience and Stephen’s grief of his missing
daughter Kate. In this way in both novels novelists take very complex
position. Both are sentimentalizing the family which is spreading the
wrong message apart from this they are more critical and cannot be
judged on surface reading.

The overall setting, theme and content suggest that both novels are
exploring valuable views of family through the protagonists. In both
novels, the strengths of community values are made apparent. When
Dorothy loses her memory and finds herself lost in London where people
were willing to help her. In fact, the first person she meets Nobby, takes
the responsibility of her welfare.
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The novel is depicting the hop-picking community which is

accepting Dorothy. The community highlighted by Orwell is very ‘warm’
and ‘kind’ community through repeated references of fire in camp.
Dorothy in the novel metaphorically gifted with warmth Orwell has
keenly present the lower class way of life. He is ‘consciously moving
away from the upper-class accents of one’. Here, Orwell aptly presenting
realistic sense of the unity and spirit of working class community.
Orwell’s constant use of pronoun ‘you’ is primary sense of community
spirit, triumph over individual suffering. The pickers’ community in the
novel sings until ‘the long midnight’ representing time of celebration and
unity. Here, Orwell in depth concerned with the condition of poor
working class community who disobeys the rules and sing round comfier
to get rid of from the horrific nature of their existence. It is asserted that
Orwell failed to escape from his comfortable middle-class life to
represent the true nature of poverty.

Similarly, the both novels are sticking with family where families
can overcome the painful experienced poverty especially in Orwell’s
novel, and McEwan novel is too about grief and anguish experienced by
the protagonist Stephan. In the novel, The Child In Time Stephan’s family
is once diminished and at last recruited. Two things are juxtaposed that
the death of Stephan’s friend Charles and his discovery that his estranged
wife is pregnant. Here, McEwan has created a world where the sudden
loss of a loved one is fulfilled by the creation of a new one or life. He
describes that as he reaches Julie’s cottage “all the sorrow, all the empty
waiting had been enclosed within a meaningful time within the richest
folding conceivable” (CT: 235). In this way, McEwan has summed up the
novel with birth of a new baby. He has depicted the family as “they lay
watching planet and moon descends through sky that was turning blue”
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(CT: 245). Here the imagery of moon and planet suggest that they find
happiness in the end through supernatural elements. The fact is that the
novel ends with rising sun which is the sentimental metaphor for renewed
possibility that their relationship will be as it was. The birth of a new
baby completes their family, and they enter into a new brighter day.

There are other similarities in the context these novel are written.
David Malcolm notes that the England in The Child In Time is what
might be imagined the version of power of Thatcher. It was a country
with privatized ambulances, and governmental responsibilities had been
refined in simpler purer terms taking no account of individual welfare. It
is reflecting perfectly Thatcher’s assertion, in 1987 edition of women
own that ‘there are individual men and women and there are families’ and
famously ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Web). In The Child In Time,
the family must support each other in the absence of state help. For
example, McEwan allows Stephan to break the conventional barriers of
time to observe and influence his mother decision to keep rather than
abort him whilst he is still in the womb. By this example Stephan taking
his responsibility to his welfare by persuading his pregnant mother to be
in love with it, whoever it was? It demonstrates that keeping families
together is necessarily in a time of individualist attitude.

Similarly, we recognize the same case with A Clergyman’s

Daughter which is written during ‘hungry thirties’. Orwell describes
England being “the land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the
old silly” (Orwell, 1935:33). Orwell asserts that the people are able to
forget this and there is a “tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel
alike and act together” which has become known as ‘Blitz Spirit’ (Orwell,
1935: 33).
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Both McEwan and Orwell are very much adhering to ‘myth’ of

idealized ‘family’ which triumphs in times of national struggle.
Throughout his literary career, Orwell has exposed the life of poor and
especially coal miners. In the present novel, he goes to greater lengths to
explore how the poor live. And destitution is portrayed as an endless
physical and mental struggle which cannot be attained or overcome by
coming together as a community. Similarly, McEwan exposed England
through the character of Charles Darke’s living at countryside. In the
earlier part of the novel we learn reality of English landscape “restriction
of water use had reduced the front gardens of suburban West London to
dust” (CT: 91). It indicates that the ruined England is hidden from sight.

In the novel, The Child In Time McEwan is so conscious about

appearances and reality and dangers of creating a false perception. It hints
that both McEwan and Orwell making visible of what invisible with the
use of sentimentalized and idealized the institution of the family. Their
portrayal of the family is very complex. Therefore, our attention to the
text is that texts are literary constructed but not journalistic information.
In the novel, Stephen asserts the knowledge as yet unknown to the reader.
We are informed that Stephen attends the sub-committee meetings
during’ what was to turn out to be the last decent summer of the twentieth
century.’ It is indicating that the narrator is constructing the story from
the future, where the plot is constructed before we do. This is nothing but
the use of metafiction also present in A Clergyman’s Daughter. In this
novel, many events are predetermined seeming to be a coincidence. It is
reflected through the event when Dorothy is forced to leave the school by
Mrs. Grey and how she faced further destitution and how she rescued in
the time. Similarly in the McEwan’s novel Thelma about to inform
Stephan of Julie’s pregnancy, and Julie calls to summon him. Thelma in
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McEwan’s novel states that the answer to your problem is ‘right in front
of you was___’ (CT: 226) the dash here highlights the phone calls come
at the ideal moment, romantically allowing Julie to announce the good
news.

In both texts, the similar factor is the plot being conveniently

driven. As David Malcolm stated that, ‘it reminds the reader a story and
story teller’ (CT: 95). The presentation of family in both texts is may be
sentimental but clearly fictional and plotted, one version of events.
McEwan makes it very explicit that one momentary decision takes the
character in a very specific direction. It is depicted at the event when
Stephan meets Julie at her cottage, he is happened with two choices to
sleep with his wife or to get out from this situation and accept the offer of
bath she has made for him. At this event another intertextual event
highlighted by the words of the narrator that ‘their hesitation was brief,
delicious before the forking paths’ (CT: 66).
Stephan’s book Lemonade gives account of the traditional contrast
between adulthood and childhood. Stephan’s friend Charles Dark
evaluates the book:

Lemonade is a message from you to previous self which will

never cease to exist. And the message is better … You have
spoken directly to children. Whether you wanted to or not,
you’ve communicated with them across the abyss that
separates the child from an adult, and you have given them a
first, ghostly intimation of their mortality…. (CT: 31)

This is what Stephan gives hint about his adaptation of the theme
of childhood from Wordsworth, one of the great philosopher and writer
concerned with the theme of childhood. Wordsworth in one of the
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threatening moments of childhood experience in the poem Charles’s

phrase alludes to Wordsworth:

Blank misgiving of a creature

Moving about in words not realized.
High instinct, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble likes a guilty Thing surprised (Web).
In the above stanza, Wordsworth explores how nature is trembling not for
mortality but for immortality. But in the novel character Charles sees only
mortality. He explores it “…It can’t last, that sooner or later they are
finished, done for, that their childhood is not for ever…” (CT: 31) but his
perception of Stephen’s book is skewed by his permission. It is his self-
fulfilling prophecy shown at the end that his attempt to live as a child,
and this is recalled by his widow that,”… your book… was a warning of
mortality…” (CT: 223). All this is she explains especially, Charles’s
suicide to Stephen at the end of the novel.

Charles is a character of the carrier of Wordsworth ideology of

childhood. Charles asserts that the conception of childhood is a
‘timelessness… a mystical state’ which is close to Wordsworth’s Ode to
Immortality, which symbolizes the imagery of the ocean which does not
lead to a discouraging direction. This imagery hints eternity rather than
servitude of mechanism:

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither?
Can in a moment travel hither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore (Web).
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The character Charles is the carrier of false or unsatisfactory

version of the novels value system. The value system of the novel is
based on a conviction of the sustenance that we may derive from
‘childhood ‘when we are adult. For Wordsworth and other like Yeats, this
sustenance could be explained in terms of the Platonic myth of a myth ‘of
Form of ‘existence’ before birth in ‘eternity’. The childhood in Kantian
term was a kind of phase he called it as partial penetration through the
classic categories of space and time. Especially, this phase was much
familiar to Wordsworth is friend Coleridge. For Coleridge time is a
‘thing-in-itself’.
The transformation of science is clearly indicated in The Child In
Time. Since Wordsworth, the perception of time and space has been seen
as a complement of Newtonian mechanics. It has created the industrial
societies govern by inhuman clock time rather than ‘organic time’. The
novel is subverting the ideas of Newtonian and Kantian manifold of our
common-sense world.

Nowadays, the science itself seems that to escape from the

Newtonian straitjacket which has confined our human nature. And this
transformation of science in explicitly (too explicitly) explored in the
present novel The Child In Time.

‘Theory of the time’ McEwan uses as a hypotext to enhance the

knowledge of time and has interwoven the narrative through time. One of
the main characters Thelma, the wife of Charles Darke is a physicist who
has worked on the theory of time and attempting a theoretical synthesis of
time which will explain the scientific revolution known as quantum
mechanics. She explores ‘Two Culture’ before Stephan, and she regrets
about the writers’ ignorance about modern science. Her synthesis of
theoretical discussion about time keeps anti-Newtonian concept of time
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as “backward flowing time” and showing that our common experience of

time, space and matter are “intricate illusion”. She concludes her
assertion in a way that “As per as I make out. You think that some local,
passing fashion like modernism-modernism! Is the intellectual
achievement of our time pathetic” (CT: 45).

The Child In Time is based on the metaphor of alternative universes

that are developed from choices which are alluding to Borges’ physical
theories of time. e.g. “Their hesitation was brief, delicious before the
forking paths” (CT: 66) is an allusion from Jorge Luis Borges’s short
story, The Garden of Forking. It is one of the finest works studied in the
field of hypertext fiction. Here Thelma’s vision of new theory referring to
“order at reality, a lighter ground of all that is an un-divided whole of
which matter, space, time even consciousness itself, would be
complicatedly related embodiments, intrusions which make up the reality
we understood” (CT: 129-30). So these things are anticipated in the
metaphysical system which is expounded in nineteen twenties and
thirties.

Theory of time is expounded in so many modern works such as

Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poem. In case of the theme of time
McEwan is obsessed with Eliot’s poem Four Quartets, one of the most
radical and experimental work. There are some allusions from the poem.
McEwan uses lines from this poem such as:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. (CT: 128)
The above lines are not only related with the story but also the lives
of characters are changed, and their events are functioning in the past,
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present and future. Stephen’s life is changed because of the past event, his
daughter’s abduction and his present under the influence of past and how
past desires are fulfilled in the future. Such kind of allusions McEwan has
very skillfully used. This novel of McEwan is incorporating many of
experiences of ‘time’ and exhibiting the philosophy of Henri Bergson.
Especially Bergson’s Time and Free Kill exploring his ideas regarding
time as ‘distinguished between extensive psychological duration, which is
unique and creative, and extensive clock time as homogeneous and
repeatable for example in the novel the subjective experience of few
seconds [of clock-time] in which Stephan manages to avoid a lorry which
is about to ‘crashing in front of his car is characterized as ‘duration
shep(ing) it-self round the event’ (CT: 89).

Along with time McEwan is obsessed with the use of politics

which is very crucial in the development of the narrative where McEwan
has used the contemporary politics as a pretext. McEwan is commenting
on the politics of M. Thatcher by using the contemporary atmosphere of
England.

Here, McEwan political ideas are cleared embodied by Donald

Davie in his book Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. It is about the
Englishness and ‘extremism’ which is he thought as a hegemonic
combination. Davie’s predictions are that before Thatcherism there was
artistic extremism in the words of Charles Olsen and others too. But
ultimately on the political grounds for the sake of moderation he gives
support to arts. But McEwan’s moderation is quite different from Davie’s
exasperated and wounded moderation, Davie’s book gives some related
hints to McEwan’s novel.
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The ‘time’ is the central aspect of the novel is a redemptive

experience means a process which violates clock time. The experience of
‘time’ is unrevealed until the novel’s closing pages occur in Chapter
Three. The experience of time is objected in the experience of Stephen
when he visited his estranged wife’s cottage. There, before seeing her he
has a strange disorientating experience of seeing his parents through the
widow of pub.

Time is a painful experience in the novel. The novel is concerned

with a child’s sudden disappearance which is the horrific experience
parents are enduring to accept their daughter less life. As a missing child
novel uses intricate images of children and complexities of time occurs at
every moment and McEwan portrays search for child that exist in every
human being. It is a search of the child in time - of Stephen and Julie
daughter Kate and individual’s youth essence which is very poignant and
warns enough through time.

The time McEwan creates is a malleable, wondrous and

infinitely complex. Jack Slay Jr. gives the detailed analysis of time which
he calls the “Vandalizing Time.” He asserts that:

Time is a vandal: it is the essences that can make one forget

the child the youthful joy of life. Simultaneously time is also
vandalized: characters experience periods that the stall is
slow motion that pass in a blur of quickness that are even
altered, with the past coming round to the present. Time then
serves as an emblem for the complexities and difficulties that
exist in everyday contemporary society. (115-116)

McEwan is presenting post Thatcherite period and the impact of

the politics and administration of M. Thatcher on the contemporary
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period. McEwan uses contemporary political contexts, the government of

Margaret Thatcher to create textual world. The world here is
characterized by oppression of poor, commercial greed, corruption and
environmental degradation. It is said that the novel is set in a futuristic
world of Thatcher. So it gives major references of futuristic tradition and
also stands with the traditional, futuristic texts: Angela Carter’s Heroes
and Villains (1969) and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980).

The Child In Time belongs to one of the political fables presenting

future of England controlled by the government of Margaret Thatcher
which is haunted by conservative extremism. McEwan once is an
interview said that his novel takes place ‘now and not now’. In the case of
futurism said that it is traditionally representing the part of science
fiction, but some writers of the contemporary period are not associated
with genre fiction are using futuristic setting to their novels. The novels
of futuristic tradition are envisioning the near future of the world. These
novels then become forewarning of the present society. Such kind of the
novel also called as an apocalyptic novel. But contemporary novels are
post-apocalyptic novels exploring the world torn by violence, wars,
chaos. In this way, Carter’s and Huban’s novels are in this tradition made
good background for McEwan’s novel The Child in Time.

The Child in Time is in the futuristic Tradition of Angela Carter’s

Heroes and Villains. Lynn Wells pointed out that the novel The Child in
Time that:

Futuristic 1996 when Thatcher policies such as state-licensed

begging are so entrenched as to be taken for granted is a
“millenarians” novel with an “apocalyptic weight” on its
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plot, which includes the looming possibility of nuclear

devastation and catastrophic weather patterns (CT: 40).

The setting of the novel is of late twentieth century London

society, in which any form of innocence seems to have been lost, and
morality and genuine communication also have been replaced by
heartless self-interest. The novel depicts grittily realistic elements of
social injustice, as Ben Knights suggests “it is as though the genre of
realism is in-adequate, as though novel projects require a shift of genre,
or at least of narrative register, in order to accomplish its ends” (213). Its
urban setting shows the degradation of contemporary humanity.
McEwan’s depiction of London corresponds with Ihal Hassan’s
description of cities in Cities of Mind, Urban Words: The
Dematerialization of metropolis in Contemporary American Fiction that:

The city remains an alembic of human time perhaps of

human nature… As a frame of choices and possibilities, the
city enacts our sense of the future: not merely abstract not
mutable only, it fulfills time in utopias or dystopic images.
(96)

Cooke praises this novel in his article in Listener:

At last, a novel which confronts the major issues of the

Eighties and draws from them a rich complicated narrative,
its ideas embodied in character and situation, its style fluent
and witty, engaging the reader’s attention on every page”. In
the same way in London Review of Books, Nicholas Spice
analyses the novel ‘expands its uncommon creative energies
on a program of understanding social and philosophical
commentary. (web)
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Apart from these themes, the present novel is mainly concerned

with regression which gives its relation to Jung’s ideas about regression.
In the novel Jung’s view of regression presented through the character
Charles Darke:

Charles is the perfect example of gross regression. His life is

with great success, his ambitions stirring for political power
all these things do not match with his later life. That is he
spends his later life in the countryside, in the woods with his
wife Thelma (a motherly figure) as a ten years old boy on
holiday (Web).

This phase of the life is extracted by June in his work Modern Man in
Search of Soul:

If you try to extract the common and essential factors from

the exhaustible variety of individual problems found in the
period of youth, we [find that]. Something in us wishes to
remain a child: to … indulge our caring for pleasure or
power (MM: 116).

Thelma has recognized that Charles problems are related to the

death of his mother when he was just twelve years old or his father
tyrannical behaviour so that ‘he was denied a childhood’(CT: 202).
Thelma expresses herself in the words about his suicide that:

He wanted to hurt me by hurting himself. He went out into

woods and sat down. He put himself out in the cold. As
suicides go, it was Petulant and childish. (CT: 203)

McEwan describes the world of Charles as on Utopian, but he does

suicide which recalls him the broadcast radio with Michael O’ Donnel.
 175

McEwan describes that in his Utopia suicide is an option: David

embodies with the words that “I think the only way out would be suicide
and suicide is terrible violence to the living …and has to be therefore
something that people only do in extremes” (web).

In this way, we come to know the fetal withdrawal of Charles from

the world because of despair and repression of motherly love. His wife
performs the role of mother or as mother-transference. But Charles knew
that his mother could not help dying, and his anger mixed with guilt and
evoked a need for punishment. Charles sexual deviation is a part of his
regressive defense:

It wasn’t an eccentric whim: It was an overwhelming fantasy

which dominated all his private moments…he wanted it in
the way some people want sex. In fact, it had a sexual side.
He wears his short trouser and had his bottom smacked by a
prostitute pretending to be a governess...It’s a pretty standard
minority taste among public school boys (CT: 200).

Thelma becomes aware of Charles problem by ‘acting into the

mother transference’ but she was unaware about her high status, and her
kindness may have contributed Charles sexual estrangement from her. On
the account of all these features of Charles character we may place him
into the category of men about whom Freud said, “Where they love, they
do not desire and where they desire, they cannot love”.

Here, the character Charles is fit to the Oedipal hero obsessed with
a desire. Freud wrote about “split libido” which is a defense against
incestuous wishes for Oedipal mother:

…the split in their, Love consists in a psychical debasement

of the sexual object, the over...valuation…being reserved for
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the incestuous object and representatives

…fulfillment…seems possible only with a debased and
despised sexual object. (Freud: 251)

The above quotation explores the personality of Charles, who lived with
his wife, flirts with the prime minister and visited prostitute.

Theme of Dystopia is the recurring motif of the novels offering it

comparison with the major novels from the past. The Child In Time is in
the tradition of the dystopia novel presenting contemporary socio-
political eroticism. The world McEwan has depicted a dystopian vision of
Thatcherite Britain. In the city the police are armed; beggars are licensed.
Stephan elaborates that “the oil and leather smell of their gun hoister”
(CT: 17). The education in the city is “a dingy, shrunken profession:
schools were up for sale to private investors, the leaving age was soon to
be lowered.” (CT: 26). Every profession is privatized in the city that is
what Thatcherite government recognizes by. For example, ambulance
companies are private business (CT: 194). Here the force of these
changes may be lost on U.S. readers. However, they were meant in 1987
to be shocking deviations from British empirical reality, although was
suggested above, logical developments of current government policies.
The novel depicted that how southern English countryside has been
turned into a vast conifer plantation so that Britain may be self-sufficient
in wood (CT: 115-19) and how the government has sponsored all day
television channel “specializing in game and chat shows, commercials
and phoning” (CT: 143). Apart from that only one exceptional thing was
that one newspaper was supporting government which was in power
many years (CT: 211). The national malaise, cold war and references of
Olympic game and the world war threatened with nuclear destruction
(CT: 34-35). In the novel, the state of Britain is malaise which presented
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through speech of Stephan’s father about the country. It was a negative

attitude that Mr. Lewis also sums up his London journey:

The Filth on the streets, the dirty message on the walls, the
poverty, son, it’s all changed in ten years. That’s the last
time I visited Pauline, ten years ago. It’s a new country more
like the Far East at its worst. I haven’t got the strength for it,
or the stomach (CT: 209).

At the last portion of the novel especially Stephen’s interview with

Prime Minister (Unidentified prime minister) it may be the real Mrs.
Thatcher, Stephan says to her ‘and you are the upholder of family values’
(CT: 180).

David Malcolm in his book Understanding Ian McEwan asserts that:

One of the differences that: critics note between The Child

In Time and McEwan’s earlier fiction is the way that public
life and history are strongly present in the later novel. The
principal features of novel’s concern with history have been
sketched out in the discussions of socially critical and
dystopic elements in the novel (Malcolm, 2002: 101).

Importantly, the novel embodies radical historical changes of the

contemporary period, such as license begging, privatization of schools,
police have been armed. All these elements provide the contemporary
Britain to the minds of the reader. Simultaneously, British government
was publishing a hand book on childcare that is seen as a cultural
landmark. (CT: 211-214). At this point protagonist, Stephan Lewis takes
the experience of history directly in various ways.
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In this way in the early part of novel Stephan is encountered with a

girl beggar who made him humble whether to give her money or not. At
this situation, Stephan rejects the government policy of the charity. This
encounter gives lot of pain to Stephan but maintain by giving a girl
beggar a five pound note, where she insults him. In the later part of the
novel Stephan again meets a group of sturdy beggars outside the hotel
when he was on the way to Thelma and Charles. All those beggars mock
at him, that makes him guilty and provided him to remember his past his
happy 1960’s and his own alerted property owning state (CT: 116-117).
His all encounters with Prime Minister are symbolizing the personal
encounter with history. In this way in the novel historical change and
conditions are personal matters. History seems to be a matter of loss in
the novel; radical changes altered the face of Britain. The cities are with
licensed beggars, causing public transport to collapse, running down
educational provision, and transformation of the English countryside into
a vast conifer plantation. Because of this the (landscapes) has been
destroyed in the name of individual freedom and national self-
scaturience.

The novel explores not only the loss of past but also the destruction
of time; the annihilation of hope, of ambition, of promise, is spread out
through the text. Stephan’s account of what has become or his friends
from student days, “the aesthetic and political experimenters, the
visionary drug takers” (CT: 25), all have ‘settled for even less’ than
whatever he has everywhere harassed and ill paid teachers, cleaners, taxi
drivers, all have failed to fulfill their promises.

The novel is centrally about the childhood, but this theme is

experimented in the novel. In The Child In Time this is challenged.
Recently in the postmodern literature the theme of childhood is changed.
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The growing interests in children’s literature and representation of

childhood in the novel and its attention in the novel questioning the
relation between childhood experience and childhood formed adult
communities. Traditionally childhood is a social construed and viewed as
a phase of existence also. Nowadays, in postmodern literature the phase is
shifted from childhood to adulthood and its development is
deconstructed. In postmodern literature the theme of childhood is
emphasized with its regression, the linearity of time and its historical
progression are challenged.

The present novel The Child in Time is delivering the subject of

childhood and challenging it’s traditionally by emphasizing on parody,
pastiche and intertextuality. On the close examination of the theme of
childhood in this novel, it seems that it is a reworking of past ideas. So
there are a number of sources to theme in the history of literature, which
worth discussing to note how this theme is under the influence of the
traditional idea of childhood.

Glancing over the history of English literature the subject of

childhood is nineteenth century creation, and it is greatly developed in
Victorian literature. There are slight changes through the time in the
presentation of this subject. It was started with its innocence from Blake
and to its strictness in Victorian family. In the Victorian families father is
very strict authoritative, despotic and mother is devoted to duties and
children are ignored and repressed. Grylls in 1978 suggested that children
were still the center of attention in Victorian family, and their treatment
was much improved from 19th century onwards. Aries [1973] talking
about how nuclear family began to grow and extended family began to
diminish in 17th century. Up to 19th century the family is presented a
harsh and cruel and also society outside the home. But in John Ruskin’s,
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word “family is a place of peace, a shelter not only from injure, but from
all terror, doubt and vision’ (Cohen: 1991). Through time, the function of
family is always changed. So there is the discovery of “childcare” which
increasing interest in children’s life and education. Over the tine, we
come to know that from Dickens’ orphan children and on apprenticeship
children are replaced by schooling. Al these ideas are from history
influencing on the literature of the postmodern era. Especially McEwan is
well aware of the fact that his presentation of the child is interlinked with
the history of childhood.

The formation of childcare handbook is traditionally constructed

idea that it was institutionalized in 19th century which became a major
concern for society. In the same way, McEwan’s novel has borrowed the
idea from the history that formation of childcare handbook impacts on
society and how it is beneficial not only to society but also the children.
The handbook is about how children should behave and what they should
learn is determined by society and adults. The rising importance of
schooling suggests that the conception of childhood as a separate phase of
existence on the way of adulthood.

Since long time childhood has been the central theme of English
literature. Children were the subject of great lyrics of Elizabeth period.
To some extent, we can find the theme of childhood in poetry of Pope
and Dryden too. However, as substantial theme of literature it was
aroused with novel. Its importance gradually increased through 18th
century and developed in19th century and challenged in 20th century.
Today, theme of childhood is to understanding Victorian literature, but
20th century produced the real literature or entertainment. In 18th century
child became the central subject or plethora of writing. This writing
reflected the dichotomy of childhood which was seen as a symbol of
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growth and development, on the other hand, and it is also a symbol of

regression and ignorance. In the earlier period authors like Janeway (A
Token For Children- 1671-72) constructed a highly moralizing, religious
oriented vision of childhood. All these ideas of childhood based on
Christian “fallen state” significantly it was the century of transition for
childhood which was the supreme symbol of the century. The childhood
was celebrating the cult of nature; it is said that childhood is the purity of
mind and soul, and triumph of innate goodness. In the next century, the
theme of childhood was perceived in a positive light. Increasingly, it was
developed in the rise of the novel, and it became the favourite theme of
the sentimental novel.

The influence of Rousseau’s Emile (1762) on the representation of

childhood in the literature of times is undeniable. Through this novel
Rousseau depicting a process of education which he considers ideal, that
is a student will be guided by mentor and adult will be inspire by youth.

Further the idea of childhood in the poetry of William Blake that

Blake depicts it the image of children’s nature purity and primal
innocence in his book Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of
Experience (1793). These works are exploring very contemporary
qualities of childhood and adult. He says that the ‘two contrary states of
the human soul’ (Sanders: 35). Blake is depicting the image of child as an
angelic, child from heaven which appears upon a cloud, on the other hand
adult have placed his feet on earth who receive inspiration from child for
writing the songs. Further, he symbolized both child and adult are
heavenly and earthly, poetic and prosaic. Here Blake is not only depicting
the child is innocent and angelic but also child is innocent and angelic but
also child is also a glide he Muse to adult. This is akin to Rousseau’s
ideal relationship between the child and adult.
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Another great writer of childhood is that romantic poet William

Wordsworth. His idea of the child is that the child is more p and spiritual
than adults. ‘The child’ for him is the ‘father of the Man’ (My Heart
Leaps Up). Wordsworth in his poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollection of Early Childhood in which he asserts that the child is
best philosophers (line: 110) and mighty prophet (114). Most of the
Wordsworth’s poems are centered on this theme of childhood and
childhood virtues: innocence, wonder, spontaneity and freedom and the
idea that there is a child within every individual adult.

The theme of Childhood will not be completed without the ‘child’

of the novels of Charles Dickens. Grylls examines that in the most of
Dickens’ novels female characters are closely similar to children and
male characters are not only children but also they remembers their
Childhood. On the other hand, his adults are corrupted and they are
departed from their youth, and the moral investigation is by sudden
reversion of childhood. Dickens in his A Christmas Carol (1843)
enriching the importance of childhood. It is brought out through the
transformation of its main character Ebenezer the transformation of its
main characters Ebenezer scrooge from being a responded. The reader
comes to know how buried childhood of scrooge. Here, childhood
innocence and virtues are elaborated under these influences.

Thus, the present novel is under the great influence of 18th and
19th-century novels. The very atmosphere, themes and characterization of
the novel are strictly in the sense of the traditional manner that is very
easy.
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2.5. The Cement Garden

This novel is primarily about the four children Jack, Julie, Sue and
Tom and death of their father and mother. This death of parents creates
the problem of their existence in the society and how they are saved from
social exploitation as orphans. Here, McEwan was accused for plagiarism
by several reviewers because the plot of this story world has several
parallels such as: Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House (1963) where the
circumstances of beginning of the novels are similar that in Gloan’s story
there are seven children who bury their mother in the backyard garden to
save from being sent to an orphanage. Further, Sir William Golding’s
dark and fascinating Lord of the Flies (1954) also concerned in case of
the children’s adventures. McEwan himself admits the influence of
Golding’s novel that “What was so attractively subversive and feasible
about Golding was his apparent assumption that in a child-dominated
world things went wrong in a most horrible and interesting way…”.(web)

Here McEwan adopts the theme of abandoned and anarchic

children and gives it a contemporary twist. So this story line and plot
evokes the reader to points out other previous stories and plots such as
R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and Richard Arthur Warren
Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica (1929). However, after hundred years
the postwar fictions have produced heterogeneous young protagonists
(Jack) like traditional stance; Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850)
and Oliver Twist (1838), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860)
influencing the narrative structure of this novel. This exhibits that
McEwan has borrowed the omniscient I-narrator like traditional narrators.
His writing style follows modernist tradition of Kafka and Beckett. He
has borrowed so many quotes from other novels, the openings line ‘I did
not kill my father…’ of The Cement Garden reminds the reader Paul
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Morel from Sons and Lovers or little six years old James in opening
pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Light House. And similar death of
Jack’s mother refers to the death of David Copper field’s mother.

The Cement Garden is a novel about the four suddenly orphaned

children who live in their isolated world. The thematic concerns of the
novel are similar to that of the Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House
(1963). The father of these children dies of heart attack while cementing
the garden. A mother’s death is also of cancer which they hide from the
world. Julie looks after the whole family as a caretaker and wanders
around the house inactively. All these orphan children live their life
without any parental control and exhibits meaningless existence in the
world. Julie’s boyfriend, Derek is shocked by knowing the secret of the
buried body of their mother.

The narrator of the novel drifts between the adolescence and that of
adulthood. The narrator of the present novel follows the tradition of
Kafka and Samuel Beckett. There is a striking similarity between the
narrative technique of Kafka and that of The Cement Garden. Both the
narrators avoid the names of the places and locations in the novel. This
feature gives The Cement Garden its different place in the all the other
contemporary novels. The narrator even avoids giving the fictional details
of the places and locations. Even the narrator is not interested to tell about
the location of the children’s residence.

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped

him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a
landmark in my physical growth, his death seemed
insignificant compared with what followed. My sisters and I
talked about him a week after he died, and sue certainly
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cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright red

blanket and carried him away. (CG: 9)

The above lines are giving the idea that, there is no shock of death
of the narrator’s father. But it is just a process or an event to which they
confront neutrally. The above incident reminds us of the narrator Paul
Morel in Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. James is the narrator of
Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927) who confronts to the death of
his father with the same neutrality.

Jack’s reaction of his mother’s death reminds us that of David

Copperfield where he reacts in the same manner of Jack.

For a moment, I perceived clearly the fact of her death, and

my crying became dry and hard. But then I pictured myself
as someone whose mother had just died and my crying was
wet and easy again (CG: 44).

In the present circumstance, Jack’s expression of grief is not that

much important than that of his way expressing it. He observes himself
that his crying has become dry and hard. The same incident happens with
David. In his school, he is informed about the death of his mother and
David narrates:

I stood upon a chair when I was left alone, and looked into
the glass to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful
my face ... I am sensible of having felt that a dignity attached
to me among the rest of the boys, and that I felt important in
my affliction. (Dickens 117-118)

In the above situation David also observes himself dry and hard like that
of jack in The Cement Garden. Here he notices his eyes are red due to the
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crying and the grief of loss of his mother. But the narrator’s attitude
towards the death of the mother is not good in the traditional manner of
the death of someone.

Absence of humour and religion are also the significant features of

McEwan’s writing style. Nowhere in the text are the humorous situations
or dialogues found. Regarding the lack of humour in the novel
Christopher Williams rightly remarks in his article Ian McEwan’s The
Cement Garden and The Tradition of the Child/Adolescent as ‘I-Narrator:

McEwan’s narrative is devoid of the humour, the

exuberance, the explicit intention of taking an irreverent
swipe at the literary tradition of the Romantic child. The
Cement Garden also subverts this tradition, but in a quieter,
more unobtrusive sort of way. The greyness of the prose, its
al-most total lack of imagery, and the absence of cultural and
historical reference points all serve to heighten our
perception of the drabness and emptiness of an existence
seemingly outside time and society (McEwan defines the
period of his own adolescence, spent at a boarding school in
Suffolk, as ‘empty time’ after an idyllic childhood. (CG:
220)

Above lines making us ware that it is clear that in the present novel
McEwan tries to uncover the adolescence of his contemporary times. This
life was totally devoid of enjoyment and humour. Therefore in the present
novel McEwan gives negligible space for the humour and religion.
Regarding the absence of religion Christopher Williams again rightly
comments that:
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The Cement Garden is an atheistic work in a very silent way

– religion simply never enters Jack’s world. There is no God,
no afterlife, no mention of the church, and none of the
superstition and fear of imaginary spirits that gradually takes
hold of the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. (222)

The above lines are symbolizing that, McEwan gives a space for the God
and fate. He directly tries to bring out an austere reality of the human life.
He has nothing to do with the superstitions and religious beliefs in the
society. His basic concerns are totally different from the contemporary
writers. Therefore, it is different from Lord of the Flies.

After all rounded study, we come to know that intertextuality is the

crucial aspect of McEwan’s writing. His whole literary career is
encrusted with different kinds of fields and activities. He is well creative
writer of the present ear deviates the forms of literature especially novel.
He is a well-known writer of the postmodern writing characterized by
special use of intertextuality, and his novels are the best presentation of
this aspect. McEwan’s knowledge of the craft of writing also underpins
McEwan’s success and apart from many distinct literary intertexts that he
uses and the in-depth research he undertakes his imagination which
needless to say also plays part in his success.