stealing phrases

“The overarching theme in both novels”

“ far less obvious”

“ perhaps the suffering Briony I submitted to is meant to be justice, Mcewan said that he was ‘in love with Briony at every stage’ and therfore the narrative formulation of the novel where the meta narrative is firmly in control is meant to convey to the reader that justice has occured. Yet we cannot help but ignore the obvious injustice of the novel, with the suffering of innocent people, the survival of Paul Marshall due to his class as opposed to his innocence”

“We see injustice due to a distinctly classed based system. Mcewan who is very left wing and liberal is making a deliberate statement in atonement about class, that it allows for those with money to be a criminal and get away with it therefore expressing injustice”

“This subverts the normal aim of crime fiction which would be to puzzle the reader and to sell for the mass market but Mcewan possibly due to his contemporary routes and his intellectual writing is attempting to elevate crime writing to something more and Marie it didactic and shocking representation of society”

“This is further represented by the structure of the novel whereby thr first part we are presented with regular chapters and a country house which is typical of golden age crime novel. It conveys the control of society and how one would presume that nothing criminal could ever occur a such a place. The expressionism of Mcewan therefore shines through and we then movie into the second part and its episodic nature where chapters are ignored and we are shown the horrors of the war.”

“Robbie depicts the horrors which he goes through in prison like a “hand on his throat” the personification of prison and the tension which this forms along with the frankly shocking description of “concrete floor” therefore employing the suffering which Robbie had to go through. This is further reflected in the form because we know the chaos which has occurred doe to the structure of the book mirroring it. This links further to what Auden said as it was at this part in the novel which we see the solicit aspect of life, horrors of the war, with the “leg” in the tree presenting itself as “this is a leg”” whereby the monsyllabic nature of the description suggests that his is an everyday occurrence despite it brutuality.

“Finally, we see justice through Atonement. This is firstly presented through the novel itself, which we learn is a metanarrative, and is served to "atone", for Briony, Lola and Paul's "crime". We gain justice firstly, because Briony has attempted to atone through her use as an omniscient third person metanarrative throughout, which, in the novels highly expressionist form, aims to convey her attempt to gain justice for both Robbie and Cecilia.”

“We are told this through "but what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survived and flourished" The use of the rhetorical question therefore lament what the novel conveys about justice, or in the eyes of Briony at least; that it has been served.”

the first parf of the novel, McEwan's crime text can almost be read as a romance, as he depicts the blossoming love between Cecilia Tallis and the lower-class, Robbie Turner. Through their differing social stations and McEwan's allusion to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, aligning Robbie with the devalued and later imprisoned Malvolio, the writer highlights that their romance will not survive. The characters keep their love for one another to themselves, a shared intimate secret which later causes endless destruction to their lives as Briony, Cecilia's younger and naïve sister, misinterprets their passion for a violent attack. Their private secret moment of passion in the library is witnessed by Briony, who believes Robbie is attacking Cecilia. The semantic field of violence and animalistic imagery in the lines…

Whilst it would have been taboo for a woman in upper-class 1935 England to admit to having premarital one sex with a working class man, Briony may not have falsely accused Robbie of being a maniac and a rapist.

Robbie and Cecilia's secret love affair later becomes evidence to Briony of Robbie's criminality, exemplifying McEwan's suggestion that secrets can only cause damage, as the lovers are punished for it.

Later in the novel, during the third part, McEwan reveals, or rather confirms, the previously secret identity of Lola's assaulter, Paul Marshall. During the first part, the reader is afforded hints of his perversion in the uncomfortable line, "Bite it. You have to bite it." However, it is only when Briony sees them getting married that the secret is officially revealed to the reader, who may have instead suspected Danny Hardman of the crime. Briony shares this fact with the reader but is unable to reveal the secret publicly due to her fear of legal consequences.

Briony reveals her last secret to the reader, a crime that most are unable to forgive. She discloses that throughout the novel she has been the sole narrator and has deceived the reader into believing that the lovers she condemned to misery and punishment had their happy ending. She is an unreliable witness

Briony, the protagonist and arguably criminal of the novel is presented as suffering guilt for her crime. For example, in Part Three, McEwan describes that,"She was the one who had cut herself off from home" suggesting that her self-inflicted punishment is isolation. Arguably then, suffering can be seen as a key element of the process of atonement and the search for forgiveness, through which McEwan perhaps wanted to indicate that suffering is nuanced and can be significant both to the victim and the criminal's role within a crime text.

Lola who is described as "hugging herself and rocking" after being sexually assaulted by Paul Marshall. However, this suffering is not lingered on in the novel.McEwan perhaps intended the reader to notice the minimization of Lola's suffering, conveying a sese that in 1930s England, such a crime was perceived as ruinous to a lady's reputation, and so suffering was concealed. McEwan was perhaps challenging his readers to critically consider the treatment of a victim's suffering, suggesting that in the detection of crime suffering is often neither consciously nor unconsciously placed in a hierarchy. Therefore, it can be considered that much of the significance of suffering in McEwan's Atonement arises from where the writer directs the Readers attention

“through the setting which we are shown, and its profound effects on the protagonist villain, Pinkie. Greene, as a communist, was fascinated by the Bildungsroman form of crime fiction, and how a character is affected by the areas in which they grew up. As a result, there is the constant repetition of where Pinkie can from throughout the novel. With Rose being described as having "Nelson place eyes", and therefore the transcending theme throughout the novel is the importance of Pinkie's socio-economic background.”

Greene, through his allocation of chapters and parts of the book to specific characters is able to change what we see about characters. Therefore, through his description of Pinkie "stroking" the "vitriol", Greene is able to convey his villainy, but also his innocence, as he holds the vitriol like it were calming, a defense mechanism drawn from his childhood to engage him to defend himself from the threats of danger around him: Moreover, this links to original involvement with Kite where there is powerful pathetic fallacy through the"storm" and we are again shown the innocence of Pinkie through him "coughing". Therefore, through Greene's narrative consciously forming the reader's consciousness to the characters, he is able to create the sense of injustice around Pinkie, because the reader gives him pathos, due to the upbringing he has had. The Marxist reading of Pinkie is therefore clear' he is a creation of the society in which he comes from.

Justice within itself is a key feature. This is reflected though the two opposing senses of justice, the Catholic, personified by Pinkie, and the secular, personified by Ida. In Brighton Rock, Green employs deliberately one-dimensional characters, this is because he is more focused on what the characters represent. Pinkie is exemplified by "between the stirrup and the ground", which is a reflection on Catholic justice and repenting, which will occur before the grave, or if not, as is equally repeated throughout the novel "dammed", therefore we can clearly see that Green deliberately paints justice with Pinkie as being a matter of religion.

However, Ida is juxtaposed with this. Perhaps ironically, she belies in "an eye for an eye", which links ironically to the old Testament, despite her being, we presume, the epitome of secular morality and justice. Ida's justice arguably is seen as prevailing in the end, where she says "someone else would have been dead if we hadn't turned up". We are shown that ultimately secular justice wins, with Pinkie, in near-Gothic description, goes off of the cliff "flaming", this therefore suggests another idea of Catholic justice, that eventually is described by Prewitt though "for this is hell nor are we out of it",

On a surface level, Greene does seem to present punishments as always just and fair.For murdering Hale and Spicer, Pinkie is destroyed by his own weapon of choice: vitriol.The poetic justice of his fate is foreshadowed in Part One, in which the bottle is personified while Pinkie secretly caresses it in Snow's with Rose. Greene writes that "life held the vitriol bottle, and it warned him: "I will spoil your looks.'" The fact that we do not even feel sympathy for Pinkie at the novel's exposition is partial proof that he deserves his punishment - we are already prevented from identifying with him, as his "slatey eyes" betray and "annihilating eternity" that juxtaposes his youth. He is also presented as virtually incapable of guilt, as the symbol of Pinkie plucking the legs and wings off a live insect, and then intoning the familiar rhyme, "she loves me, she loves me not," implies his total apathy translates to humans also, as he thinks of Rose.Arguably the greatest victim in the novel, Rose is certainly physically freed by Pinkie'sdeath. Whilst directly ending his constant dissembling and manipulation, Rose stops praying, stating that "if he wants to be damned, then I will be damned too." After his presence is removed, she is able to return to confession, regaining some of what she once was before being absorbed into the world of the mob. In this sense, Greene presents Pinkie's punishment as both fair and just. he has died for the men he killed, and Rose has benefitted from his death.

the other hand, Greene's narrative is infiltrated with constant references to a diseased society - one in which its victims become criminals and pay the price for its initial crimes. Both Pinkie and Rose hail from areas of extreme destitution, with Pinkie's particular neighbourhood bearing the ironic name of Paradise Piece. The setting Graham designs is not quite so prelapsarian: his home is described as one that looks as if it has endured "intense bombardment." As the details of Pinkie's upbringing are unravelled, it is difficult not to feel at least a twinge of doubt about his seemingly evil nature. On the contrary, other characters who are exceedingly wealthy are able to commit crime with police protection. Modelled on the real life gang leader Charles Sabini, Mr Colleoni occupies the cosmopolitan to such an extent that he almost is it - his glacé shoes and gold cigar lighter obscure the criminal underbelly he dominates - the police themselves warn Pinkie against carving up Tate and Brewer, telling him no one will fake him an alibi over Colleoni. Though by all means likely committing more crimes than Pinkie, on a larger scale, and bringing the justice site on into a circle of corruption, Colleoni goes unpunished.Pinkie's youth is constantly emphasised by his epithet "the boy" and suggests that the punishment he receives is not appropriate given his age and lack of choice with regards to his involvement in crime. Furthermore, Pinkie's evil and disrespectful behaviour towards Rose appears to be tied to an inherent fear of the sexuality of women. Pinkie has abstained from his exposure to his parents having sex on a "Saturday night." Pinkie shows abnormal sexual behaviour as all around is associated with pain. Moreover, he describes sex as "human shame," indicating the negative and embarrassed associations he has with sex and women.

Greene presents us with a dilemma: if Pinkie wishes to be damned, is being sent to Hella just punishment for him? Where the religious world intersects with the secular sphere dominated by characters such as Ida, the "fairness" of punishment becomes much more convoluted. Ida succeeds in convicting Pinkie for the murder of Hale, and therefore is unpunished by the denouement. However, Greene does imply she commits other social crimes that she is never punished for. The dynamic verb "belched" manifests her lack of propriety, and mirrors her view of life - "she took life with a deadly seriousness." In a way she attempts to rescue Rose and better her quality of life whilst she is on Earth, but to Rose, a committed Catholic, the road to heaven is more important. Ida is never punished for the consequences of her messianic mothering of rose

The orchestrator of this horror, Pinkie, is arguably not punished justly, either. Greene's use of setting almost suggests that Pinkie brings Hell with him. When he moves through Brighton, the previously "glittering" palace pier is surrounded by "dark poison bottle green," the uniform at Frank's reveals "flames and chasms of the sky." The sickly Prewitt surmises this in an exophoric reference to Faustus: "This is Hell, not am I out of it." In resigning himself to damnation, Pinkie exercises control over his own fate. He is no longer at the "appalling strangeness [...] of the mercy of God," but right where he wishes to be: where "the flames had literally got him."

while he is traumatised by the "Saturday night activity" of his parents having sex. Near the end of the novel, when Pinkie marries Rose, Greene writes that this environment has left a "visible scar" on him evoking a sense that Pinkie has physically suffered due to his difficult and cruel childhood.Therefore, Greene presents suffering within the criminal as significant to our understanding of their crimes as it can contextualise the difficulties they face and the violent reactions to a criminal world set against them.

Coleridge's Romantic beliefs also deepen the moral implications of the Mariner's act. The poem can be interpreted through the One Life principle, a Romantic philosophy that views all living things as spiritually interconnected. If all life forms share a single divine essence, then the destruction of the Albatross represents not simply the death of a bird but a violation of the unity of creation itself. From this perspective, the Mariner's crime becomes metaphysical as well as moral: he disrupts the balance between humanity and the natural world, Coleridge's vivid depictions of the hostile environment following the murder, the "rotting sea" and the oppressive stillness of the ship, symbolise nature's retaliation against this disruption.

However, Coleridge also charts the Mariner's gradual moral transformation. The turning point occurs when he spontaneously blesses the water snakes: "O happy living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare. Crucially, this blessing occurs "unaware," suggesting that the Mariner' sredemption begins only when he instinctively recognises the intrinsic beauty and value of otherforms of life. This moment signals his reconciliation with the natural world and aligns with the Romantic belief that spiritual insight arises through emotional engagement with nature.

"The Albatross fell off, and sank / Like lead into the sea." The simile emphasises the sudden release of his spiritual burden: the physical symbol of guilt disappears once the Mariner achieves genuine reverence for life

Yet Coleridge does not present redemption as complete absolution. The Mariner's punishment continues through the compulsive retelling of his story, driven by the "agony" that periodically seizes him. This narrative compulsion suggests that the Mariner must spend his life bearing witness to his transgression, transforming his crime into a moral lesson for others. The frame narrative therefore reinforces the poem's didactic purpose, as the Wedding Guest becomes a surrogate for the reader who must absorb the poem's moral insight.

Ultimately, the question of whether the Mariner is a criminal depends on how the poem is interpreted. A purely literal reading might reduce his offence to the shooting of a bird, an act that appears relatively trivial. However, Coleridge's extensive use of symbolism, religious imagery, and Romantic philosophy strongly encourages a deeper interpretation in which the killing of the Albatross represents a violation of the sacred unity of nature. In this sense, the Mariner is indeed guilty of a profound crime - not merely against a creature, but against the spiritual order of the universe. As the poem's archaic title and mythic tone suggest, Coleridge constructs the narrative as a moral fable rather than a realistic account.