Negotiating metafictional aspects of postmodern narrative in Ian McEwan's atonement

Abstract

Atonement has been regarded as McEwan's best demonstration of his protracted reflections on the form of the English novel, and his lengthy negotiations on the traditions of modern English fiction writing and criticism passed down from their predecessors. In that order, some might assume that McEwan's Atonement could be associated both with modernism and postmodernism. Some even go further to claim that the novel along with its relation to modernism and postmodernism eventually lands with realism. Such a claim is based on the assumption that the novel resists postmodernism's moral fickleness and pits against it a tradition of English empiricism. On the other hand, the current paper intends to argue otherwise; that is, to argue in favor of postmodern metafictional narrative in Atonement. A claim that could feasibly be supported by—but yet to be consolidated in the current research—the thoughts of some writers like Wood who suggest that the novel throughout its narrative events, but more particularly with its ending, could very possibly be perceived as a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators.