It's not impossible.' It is the last thing Briony shares with us before going to sleep and the whole book wraps. She is also, though, thinking of another draft, in which we end with 'Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella. The end of Atonement, then, repudiates itself, or tries to: It tells you that it's not the end that should have been.īriony also points out that she did not allow her lovers to forgive her. We get the conclusion she withheld from her novel anyway.

The ending she's referring to, though, isn't the end of the book we're reading, just the end to the book she wrote. 'How could that constitute an ending?' Briony asks four paragraphs from the end after explaining why she changed the facts. Instead she simply returned to the hospital and just imagined herself going to her sister's. Furthermore, Briony never actually walked to her sister's apartment, as she says she did in part 3. Robbie died on the Bray Dunes on Jof infection, and Cecilia died a few months later in a bombing during the German airstrikes on London. Specifically, Robbie and Cecilia didn't reunite and live happily ever after. Specifically, the last paragraphs are where Briony tells us (indirectly, but pretty clearly) that in the novel we've just finished reading, some of the plot isn't 'really' what happened. We knew this already of course (it's a work of fiction, after all), but it's still a little bit of a shock. The last three paragraphs of Atonement basically tell you that everything in the book was made up.

Book atonement