Briony

• 'Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing'

  shows how she is controlled by a 'demon' ironic as she creates chaos with the crimes she commits
• 'She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so'

  her sense of order was to the core which continues into her later life
• 'This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent'

  The overwhelming reality of adulthood upon young 13 y/o Briony - state of liminality influences her understanding of love, life and adult issues.
• 'It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding'


  Foreshadows all the unhappiness briony will create in the future
• 'She was taking the part...because that was how Leon was to see her'

  In briony world reality and fiction are interchangeable
• 'Only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.'

  part 1

  provides a clue that this is briony novel

  she wants to tell the story from different perspectives
• 'By clinging to what she believed she knew...she was able to keep from mind the damage she only dimly sensed she was doing.'

  she suppressed what she knows is the truth to continue in her fantasy
• 'She would never be able to console herself that she was pressured or bullied, she never was. She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own destruction.'

  she knows she is to blame and cannot defend herself
• 'Briony felt a dreamy nostalgia a vague yearning for a long lost life'

  suffers consequences which she acknowledges she brought upon herself
• 'To let my lovers live and unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.'

  she provides the ending the reader desires but knows it is not her place to give herself their forgiveness
• 'She knew what was required of her. Not simply a letter, but a new draft, an atonement.'

  briony realises that her novel is the closest she will get to atonement
• 'She was confirmed again in her view that evil was complicated and misleading.'

  • young brionys realisation also fits into future brionys life
  • is she evil?
• 'The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat...with the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal.'

  young briony twists everything to make robbie the criminal
• 'The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat...with the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal.'

  • shows brionys lack of ability to empathise
  • doesn't realise her actions would affect robbie and Cecilia
• 'She was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit.'

  part 1

  briony believes shes gained maturity

  arrogance causes her to commit this crime
• 'She was too young, too awestruck, too keen to please, to insist on making her own way back.'

  Briony thought the had matured, but it is only with hindsight that she can see how naïve she was, and how this led to her mistake.
• 'There was nothing she could not describe'

  brionys talent for writing allows her to turn fiction into reality and spin webs of lies
• 'It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.'

  Brionys desperation to write causes her to turn fiction into reality
• 'Passion for secrets'

  foreshadowing

  • untrustworthy character?
• 'nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting'

  • may explain why she did her crime
  • desire for chaos?
• "But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all."

  • moment of realisation for briony
• 'an indignant little girl'

  • feels anger as she feels shes not being treated fairly
  • seeks attention
• 'Brionys room was a shrine to her controlling demon'

  • demon suggests dark undertones to her character
  • desire to have the world her way
• 'busy priggish conceited little girl'

  • self-righteous
  • thinks herself better than everyone
• 'she had never thought of herself as a liar'

  • still carries this unrealistic narrative
  • childish view