McEwan confronts his readers with painful forms of awareness, starting from the inevitably constructed and potentially deceiving nature of our perceptions, inferences, and projections-what Walter Pater defined as 'each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world' (248). This 'traumatic' final twist is central to the book's investigation of the act of meaning-making, at the heart of the human condition. Due to the empathic reading it engenders, this historiographic metafiction triggers what Miller defines as 'Reader's Trauma' (96), eloquently inviting certain assumptions about the narrated world that are ultimately revealed as 'grotesquely mistaken' (96). Hillis Miller remarks, apropos of Atonement, 'I know that the characters are Active, but they seem like real people to me' (92). Far from pivoting solely on Briony's initial failure to respond to the complexity of the surrounding world and subsequent attempts to redress her mistake, McEwan's novel is a daring combination of immersive realism and metafictional deconstruction. These critical statements are cleverly argued, but drifting towards a nihilistic interpretation of McEwan's book may actually amount to a disempowering reading strategy. The result is a novel that draws the reader 'to the darkest place possible, a place where all our efforts at atonement come to naught, where words are ultimately powerless where neither love nor art nor science nor self-sacrifice can effect redemption' (213).

Pastoor wonders 'why McEwan wrote such a beautiful novel so completely and utterly devoid of hope' (211), contrasting the author's belief 'in the possibility of secular transcendence through art' (212) with his refusal to allow his characters a form of salvation. IN 'The Absence of Atonement in Atonement' Charles Pastoor defines the book as an 'utterly bleak work of fiction that foregrounds its own bleakness' (212).

Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) But we can tell the story of how it was once done, and that must be sufficient. He sat down in his golden chair in his castle and said, 'I cannot light the fire. But when another generation had passed, Rabbi Israel Salanter was called upon to perform the task.

Mcewan ian atonement