Ian McEwan's Atonement is a romantic war tragedy metafiction published in 2001. The novel follows the lives of young lovers Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, the two protagonists of the story who experience the conflict of the text as they are never able to realize their dreams of eternal love because they are separated by a hot-headed lie constructed by Cecelia's younger sister, Briony Tallis. Themes such as love, truth and memory are conflictingly explored by McEwan throughout the text in the form of stylistic features such as focus, reliability and irony which allow the audience to delve deeper into the thought processes of the main characters in the novel, thus giving them a deeper insight. level of insight and perspective into how they operate and what their intentions are. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayAtonement intelligently engages the reader through a prism of first- and third-person perspectives, allowing the themes of truth and memory via focus and reliability. For example, in chapter 6, as Cecilia (Emily Tallis's mother) talks about her children, the paragraphs are written entirely in the third person; However, the focusing technique filters the narration through Emily's point of view, allowing the audience to gain insight into her thoughts, which then allows readers to identify some of these thought processes as distorted truth . For example, in one of the paragraphs, Emily considers herself to have "a sixth sense, a sprawling consciousness that emerges from the darkness and moves through the house, invisible and all-knowing." This can be seen as Emily arrogantly believing that she knows her children in detail - "only the truth". However, his presumed confidence is proven false in the latter stages of the novel. One particular scene that clearly demonstrates this is when she decided to believe Briony's false accusation that Robbie was a rapist; she ignores his wild imagination and his tendency to embellish the truth. This miscalculation proves that Emily is far from correct in believing she is "omniscient" and in fact provides evidence that she is living in her own distorted version of reality. Given this result, the evidence indicates that Emily is an unreliable narrator, as her version of events differs significantly from that experienced by other seemingly more reliable characters, such as Cecilia, who knows that Robbie was wrongly accused and is innocent. We can then add that Emily is unreliable in a rather unique way, as shown by the particular language used in focusing her thoughts. In this scene, there is an apparent tone of arrogance; for example, "what for others would have been a suffocation was for his alert senses, which were sharpened like the cat's whiskers of an old cordless [sic], an almost unbearable amplification." This almost narcissistic feeling of superiority suggests that she fully and completely believes that she knows everything, which is a departure from the way in which another character, Briony, is unreliable; in the latter's case, throughout the novel she appears deep within her character to be aware of her own unreliability, but she faces an internal struggle to admit this to herself and others , as later revealed by the great regret she shows during her atonement for falsely accusing Robbie. Analyzing these characters and situations through the techniques of focalization and reliability allows the audience to,.