RT Article
T1 Authorial Atonement in Ian McEwan's Atonement and Sweet Tooth
JF Christianity & literature
VO 68
IS 2
SP 297
OP 310
A1 Pastoor, Charles Cornelius
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1662625324
AB Ian's McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement ends with a question: "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?" (350). And it concludes, in response to this question, that there "There is . No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists" (350-51). I consider in the first part of this article what leads Briony Tallis, the novel's fictive author, to this bleak conclusion. In the second part I consider how McEwan takes up the question again in his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth and how he arrives at a more hopeful answer.
K1 Ian McEwan
K1 Sweet Tooth
K1 metafiction
K1 New Atheism
K1 reader response
DO 10.1177/0148333118794017