Briony & Robbie

Briony & Robbie

Do you think Briony fancied Robbie?
Do you think she accused him because
she was jealous of him and her sister Cecilia?










While reading the book, I didn't imagine Briony as a jealous young girl, frustrated because her sister had Robbie's love. I never thought she did it because she actually loved Robbie. But, after watching the film and seeing the scene - a terribly wonderful scene in my point of view! - when Robbie rescues Briony from drowning, I started thinking that maybe it could be truth, that she had a feeling for him. After that, at St. Thomas's Hospital, when Briony aged 18 actually says she had a special feeling for him when she was little, made me really believe in it. Although Briony had a very creative imagination and she didn't understand what she had seen during that summer day... personnaly, I cannot ignore the fact that she probably fancied to Robbie Turner.







*******************************************************








Robbie Turner: Come on, pal. You should be getting dressed.
Briony Tallis, aged 13: If I fell in the river, would you save me?
Robbie Turner: Of course.
[Briony jumps into the water and Robbie dives after her; eventually, he pulls her out of the water and drops her near the bank]
Briony Tallis, aged 13: Thank you, thank you, thank you...
Robbie Turner: That was an incredibly bloody stupid thing to do.
Briony Tallis, aged 13: I wanted you to save me.
Robbie Turner: Don't you know how easily you could have drowned?
Briony Tallis, aged 13: You saved me.
Robbie Turner: You stupid child! You could have killed us both! Is that your idea of a joke?
[she looks at him for a moment, shocked by his tone, but defiant nonetheless]
Briony Tallis, aged 13: I want to thank you for saving my life. I'll be eternally grateful to you.
[he strides away angrily, into the woods, leaving Briony disconsolate amidst the cow parsley]




*******************************************************




she gave me my 1900th comment!
thank you -- i will miss you so much! xD


{ She gave me my 2000th comment!
I really like her and her blog!
thank you dear!! }


miss english-stories made me a wonderful surprise
come here and here




*******************************************************


[ Ajouter un commentaire ] [ 135 commentaires ]

# Posté le jeudi 03 avril 2008 10:31

Modifié le jeudi 10 avril 2008 10:54

What do you think is more interesting?

What do you think is more interesting?




What do you find more interesting about this novel/film?
The love story?
The 2nd World War?
Briony's psychological evolution:
her misundersanding and enduring guilt ?









I think what touched me more in this film or novel was the second world war background. I still find myself remembering and imagining all those families terribly torn apart, lovers forever separated... all that really touched me. The idea of having the war as a background for the love story, to show how that same story could have truly happened to real people! It is absolutely terrible! I feel really sad when I think that could have happened... In the other way, I suppose the characters' psychology is great too. Briony is such a wonderful character! I still can't understand her totally! There is always a mystery behind those blue eyes. We never really know what she is thinking... and the sorrow and grief that is shown in her last monologue is simply... simply perfect!




she gave me my 2100th comment! thanks :D





[ Ajouter un commentaire ] [ 164 commentaires ]

# Posté le jeudi 10 avril 2008 11:26

Modifié le samedi 19 avril 2008 05:04

aren't they all innocent?

aren't they all innocent?


Which character do you think was the “most innocent”?
Robbie – because he was falsly accused and therefore lost the rest
of his life in jail or fighting in a bloody war? Cecilia – because she
died apart from the man she loved and refusing to talk to her family?
Or Briony – because she felt guilty until the end of her life and she
could never forgive herself?






▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐▐







This is a rather difficult question. I am sure most of you will simply say Briony was a monster. But, I don't know... I don't feel I can judge her and blame her for what she did. If we were in her place, at that hottest day of 1935, we would perhaps do the same... how can we know, for certain, that we wouldn't do exactly what she did? Of course I think Robbie and Cecilia were innocent, even if they made some fateful mistakes. They should have been more careful about the letter or the library scene... but anyway... they are innocent, no doubts about that. But, coming back to Briony's case, I personally believe Briony wasn't that monstruous child. She was a young girl. I know it doesn't justify what she did but... I simply can't see her as a cruel child. She suffered an enduring guilty until her death day, and for me, that is pain enough.




she gave me my 2200th comment! thanks^^

[ Ajouter un commentaire ] [ 125 commentaires ]

# Posté le dimanche 20 avril 2008 03:37

Modifié le samedi 17 mai 2008 08:04

Briony's atonement

Briony's atonement




Do you think Briony actually gets her atonement in the end?
Do you think that after giving Robbie and Cecilia's happiness
in her book, she finally finds peace?






This is a very difficult question to be answered. I seriously don't know. I can't say Briony got her atonement. What she did, what she helped doing, was far too terrible to be forgiven. But, after a lifetime, after writting several books including one called Atonement, I suppose she may have found peace. Also after some time she understood that it wasn't all her fault, that everything contributed to Cecilia and Robbie's story. Briony was not the only one to blame as we talked in another of this blog's articles, there were Cecilia's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tallis, the police and even the Second World War... everything contributed to this terribly sad love story. And I really believe Briony's understood it in the end...








she gave me my 2300th comment. thank you!

she gave me my 2400th comment! thanks! :D

she gave me my 2500th comment! thank you!!!

she gave me my 2600th comment! :D thanks!

she gave me my 2700th comment!!! :D thank you!

she gave me my 2800th comment! :D thank you^^

she gave me my 1900th comment! thank you my angel! :D









*PUB*




[ Ajouter un commentaire ] [ 286 commentaires ]

# Posté le vendredi 25 avril 2008 14:03

Modifié le dimanche 18 mai 2008 06:21

The End

The End

Atonement
The End






«There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn't do it to them. I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. i face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.
The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher from that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.
I've been standing at the window, feeling waves of tenderness beat the remaining strengh from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I've been watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn't a weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration... Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It's not impossible.
But now I must sleep.»


Copyright © 2002 by Ian McEwan
Everything started in 1935...






She Gave Me My 3000th Comment... so, this is the end.






«Robbie, look at me, come back, come back to me...»




[ Ajouter un commentaire ] [ 189 commentaires ]

# Posté le dimanche 04 mai 2008 12:56

Modifié le mercredi 21 mai 2008 12:14