And now begins the Atonement - Briony works in a hospital
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Sarah
said...
It’s kind of nice to have a change of pace again; although I like Robbie so much more as a character, I find the sections about Briony a bit less tedious to read. The hospital seems so awful and scary, and not like something that Briony would want to put up with at all; I thought it was sort of in character that Briony made so many mistakes because she’s just so spacey. It seemed like an environment she would never enjoy being in, but it was clear that submitting to all that tedium was her way of trying to pay for what she did. In becoming a mere number among a group of nurses, she is trying to strip herself of her identity and forget her past. Not only that, but the endless, tedious work helps her block out any thoughts whatsoever. This really made me feel bad for her; yes, she recognizes that she is “unforgivable” now, but naturally, coming from someone who was barely mad at her in the first place, I feel like she’s really putting herself through so much.
The environment both inside and outside of the hospital is miserable; there is no way Briony can escape it. She can either indulge the miserable, dull isolation that is her nurse’s training, or indulge the hectic life of all the civilians elsewhere whose lives are falling apart because of the war, and she seems to prefer the latter. On that note, it was almost astounding just how much Emily’s life has fallen apart; from the way it was described in the book, I can’t really tell how she feels about that fact, but it made me wonder if all the disaster was partly due to Cecelia’s being gone. And that makes me curious what her side of the story is at this point; obviously there’s no way to know if Emily has written to Cecelia as well, but I would imagine that the latter doesn’t care very much. (I feel like there’s some symbolic significance to Betty ‘breaking’ the vase, but I can’t think of anything right now.)
I was a little surprised when I found out that Briony was still writing stories, and basing them off of people like Sister Drummond, no less. Even though she has learned to stop basing her stories off of real people and events, I feel like doing a thing like that is still terribly risky and would think she would have realized that. Also, the scene where Briony was enjoying her freedom outside of the hospital seemed to be a direct parallel to Robbie’s enjoyment of his freedom outside of the jail. I think that’s interesting, though, because their situations are kind of opposite; Robbie’s suffering was completely unfair and against his control, but Briony not only (kind of) deserved what she got, but she was the one who put herself through the training in the first place. I’m not sure I understand why Briony loves the freedom of the outside world so much.
I like the idea of Jack possibly sending the letter about Lola and Paul’s marriage because he knew the truth all along. I’m looking forward to reading that scene and possibly getting more insight into Briony’s head.
Just like in Parts One and Two, Part Three undergoes another shift in literary style. While Part One, had this whole fairytale–like tone and surreal mood, and while Part Two wakes the reader up from the dream, and throws the reader into the middle of a war scene, Part Three is a mixture of surrealism and harsh reality. For starters, five years have gone by, and Briony is learning how to become a nurse. Just like how Part Two was a wake–up call for the readers, Briony herself experiences her own wake–up call, in which she is placed in an environment that will have lives hanging in the balance. Part Three catches the readers up on Briony’s life. She has declined the offer to go to school at Cambridge, to take up nursing, is struggling to get published and keeps limited contact with her parents. Just like how the theme of class struggle is emphasized throughout the novel, Briony experiences her own class struggle as a nurse. When training to become a nurse, Briony is given a name badge to wear with the wrong first initial, having the letter ‘N’ where a ‘B’ should be. “She had gone up to the sister to point out courteously that a mistake had been made with her name badge. She was B. Tallis, not, as it said on the little rectangular brooch, N. Tallis. The reply was calm. ‘You are, and will remain, as you have been designated. Your Christian name is of no interest to me. Now kindly sit down, Nurse Tallis.’ ” (Page 259). Even as a nurse, the Nursing Academy does not see class nor care about class. Nursing, for Briony has caused her to be without a class and even without her original name. Everything that we, the reader, has known about Briony Tallis is completely stripped. Briony is no longer apart of the upperclass, but is equal among the rest of the working class nurses. Briony has be reduced so lowly, that she can’t even tell her parents the details in which her working conditions have come to. In fact, Briony tells very little to her parents about her job as a nurse working in London. But the other big twist that happens in this section, is the news Briony receives from her father regarding Lola and Paul Marshall. The two are to be married, and Jack Tallis underscores the letter with “love as always,” and Briony reads into her father’s omniscient awareness into the fact that he may have known that Paul Marshall was the criminal that night instead of Robbie. “He gave no reason why he supposed she would want to know and made no comment on the matter himself. He simply signed off in a scrawl down the page – ‘love as always.’ . . . She wondered whether in sending his letter with its specific information he was trying to tell her that he knew the truth.” (Pages 268 – 269). It is nor clearly explained in the reading if Jack Tallis officially knew that it was Paul Marshall, but nevertheless, Briony experiences a wave a guilt, knowing full well that the rapist in fact was not and could never have been Robbie Turner.
Oh Briony. Her guilt is all consuming and seems to be the only thing she can write about. Never mind the waging war, never mind the wounded solider, I want to hear about Briony not carrying the right number of bedpans.
That said, it is interesting to read about the life of a WWII nurse. Briony experiences the uncertainty of war and the rigidity of hospital routines. Briony doesn't often venture outside the hospital walls, or even outside her head. She has created a new role for her self; she is no longer the heroine, she is the martyr. When she isn't punishing herself, she is thinking about how hard her life her, how much pain she causes herself. Briony doesn't think about how much pain she caused Robbie and Cecelia. By punishing herself, Briony doesn't relieve their pain. How can these acts help mend her broken bridges? No, Briony plays the part of self-involved martyr very well.
This part of the book was so frustrating for me. I cannot stand Briony at all. She's so freaking stuck up and self centered and just wrong it pisses me off. While I try and feel bad for her being yelled at by the head nurse and cleaning out bedpans I can't really say I feel bad for her at all. Maybe I would be able to find a little bit of compassion if she was more aware of her crimes and had at least admitted to other people that she had been wrong. But instead she just does the complete opposite and just pines around saying poor old me look at all the bad things that happened to me I'm the one you should really care about. I can't even see her choice to leave college and support the war effort by being a nurse as a kind of atonement because she doesn't solve anything except her own wounded ego. Briony doesn't really seemed to have learned much from her experiences as a ten year old but perhaps after going through many hardships she is able to think about something else besides herself and write her novel of atonement.
Well back to Briony and her self-pitying, and self-flagellating attitude. She feels the need to repent for what she did to Robbie, and rightly so, but the way she is atoning just seems wrong to me. What she wants is to feel pain and suffering for what she did, but what she should be doing is working to help others to make amends for what she did. Atonement isn’t about punishing yourself it’s about making amends for your wrong doings. Briony’s egocentric attitude causes her to twist this idea of atoning into a self centered punishment, rather than an opportunity to become a more virtuous person. I had truly hoped that I would be able to feel forgiveness toward Briony because of her desire to atone, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel sympathetic to someone who twists every to become part of her own egomaniacal fantasy even if they had the best intentions.
In this chapter, Briony has become a nurse in order to find forgiveness for her crime. She has gone from being free spirited to being in a strict environment with plenty of discipline. In this environment she finds it hard to write but sometimes she can't help it. She is able to go back into the writer's environment and create a story using real people. What I did find funny in this chapter was that the vase that began Robbie's and Cecilia's affair was finally completely broken. I just found it funny that Betty was blamed but a bit upset that now they will never know that Cecilia and Robbie's affections were shown when arguing about the vase. When Briony's father sends her a letter saying that Lola was to marry Paul Marshall. I was astounded that Lola would marry her rapist.
During the process of her atonement, Briony reverses the social scene at the hospital. Where she used to be served and doted on, she now becomes the servant. Briony’s identity is compromised – she is to be called “Nurse Tallis.” She is taken for granted, and she’s hired to follow orders: this opposes her own desire for control at the beginning of the novel. The drastic change of her environment is demeaning, yet she takes every humiliating action to serve as her punishment for her crime. In my opinion, she’s too focused on her own desire for atonement, instead of focusing on helping those around her to the best of her abilities.
The beginning of this reading is the constant build up for all the retreating soldiers. Briony is instructed to clean, make beds, and clean some more. “The war against germs never ceased” (pg 256). The nurses are trying to minimize the casualties of disease as they work their hands to the bone. Later in the reading Briony receives a letter from home updating her on all current news back there. The most interesting news she receives is the news that her uncle’s vase has been shattered. This symbolizes the fact that Robbie and Cecilia’s relations ship has been destroyed with no repair (because Robbie is dead). At the end of the reading, “The British army in northern France was “making strategic withdrawals”” and the hospital is getting loads of supplies to care for all of the troops that are coming.
Five years after her crime, Briony is working as a nurse as a form of penance. She's not enjoying herself at all, yet she feels like she has to stay there, as though this will make everything better. Not much happened that was noteworthy in this section; my favorite part, though, was the letter from Jack. He told Briony that Betty dropped and broke THE vase. The same one Cecilia and Robbie broke in the beginning. I loved all the symbolism with this - another person getting blamed for something they didn't do. We also find out that Lola and Paul are getting married, and Briony admits that she is the one who made it possible. I think the most important line in this section is "...she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable." (pg. 269). I like seeing how Briony has grown up - she's not a kid anymore, and she knows that she screwed up Robbie and Cecilia's lives.
So we're back to Briony now. It's five years later, and she is working on becoming a nurse. She is trying to atone for when she did, but she's going about it the wrong way. Everything has to be about her, and this is certainly no exception. She's not becoming a nurse to help other people. She's becoming a nurse to punish herself in hopes that it will make her feel better. She's turning something as selfless as being a nurse into a selfish punishment. She's too self centered. She even freaks out about having the wrong initial on her name tag. She is surrounded by dying soldiers who are afraid and in pain, and she can't get over having one wrong letter on her name tag. It's a name that she cant even use anyway. She also gets a letter from her father informing her that Paul and Lola will be married soon.
In part three, we have another total setting change. We are suddenly many years later and Briony is trying to become a nurse. In this section, Briony continues to be completely self centered and only cares about herself. She becomes a nurse to try and atone for what she did to Robbie, yet she seems to care less about what she actually did to Robbie and more about not wanting to think about it. I got the sense that Briony thought that if she put herself through enough pain and suffering, she would magically become not guilty, which is not quite how it works. There were times throughout this reading where I started to feel a little sympathy for Briony. She had made one mistake when she was still a child and not only did it screw up everyone else’s lives, it screwed up her life too. But whenever I started to feel bad for her, she would say something that just made me hate her even more. She worked in a hospital with hundreds of dying soldiers, yet at some points all Briony was thinking about was how she was not carrying enough bedpans. On page 269, she comes the closest she will ever come to being atoned for what she did. “She paused outside…. Perhaps weeks.” This paragraph reminds the reader of spring, which is the season of rebirth and this small glimpse of the outside world is the closest Briony comes to being reborn.
So this section is where we get our first look at "grown up" Briony. She is only eighteen which means only five years have passed but it seems that something has changed within her. All of the descriptions of her actions and surroundings seem so cold and unfeeling. It makes sense since they are in a hospital; everything being so....sterile. Though it may seem blasphemous or whatever, but I felt that I could see some parallels between Briony's and Robbie's situations. Especially because the nurses, like the soldiers, go by their last name. This procedure prevents the patients from getting to familiar with or attached to the nurses and the nurses to the patients likewise. This feeds into Briony's appearance as this fumbling robot. One line that demonstrates
Briony's newfound distance with her parents is "It seemed theatrical to Briony, and ridiculous, grown young women tearful for their mothers, or as one of the students put it through her sobs, for the smell of Daddy's pipe," p261. To me it feels like this line is supposed to prove to us that she is grown up, but really it is almost a necessity because if she showed any longing to be with her parent we, as a reader, would hate her even more.
Besides these previously mentioned things, nothing overly dramatic happens in this section. It is mostly Briony's time as a nurse. The one big thing was the fact that Paul Marshall and Lola were getting married. Imagine seeing that in print. Holy moly! That would have been shocking and puzzling, and quite frankly infuriating. The odd thing is that I didn't feel that reaction form Briony. She just felt the slow quiet guilt seep into her pores as she pondered the wedding. "She was unforgivable," (p269)
We have returned to a Briony narrative, it is approximately set five years later, and Briony is undergoing nurse training. Briony's fanciful way of life has been stripped away and she is now forced to see reality as it is. I can understand why she chose nursing as a form of personal punishment. It's a way of being able to help those whose lives are in great distress. Yet nursing is not enough to revoke Briony's guilt. As she goes about her daily duties, all of which are very orderly and precise, Briony is consumed by thoughts of guilt."Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy."(268)
In my opinion, Briony is extremely Introspective. Her narrative goes back and forth from Briony's personal selfish thoughts and feelings of guilt to the hospital which is filled with death and sickness. Clearly her heart isn't in nursing. Doesn't it seem more practical for Briony to confront Robbie and Cecilia head on rather than dealing with her guilt ineffectively?
This is where Briony begins her atonement. She cleans, scrubbing her hands raw, she follows direction to the Q to the point of worrying about everything she does. Which is very un-Briony. This she believes is her atonement, her way of paying for what she did. Of course instead of doing what she should of done which is tell the truth. Doing this she believes she can maybe not allow robbie and cecilia to forgive her but for her to forgive herself. Throughout this part in the story all shes worried about is her performance. This is obnoxious because what she should be concerned with is the patients.
In part three Briony is attempting to atone for the wrong she did to both her sister and Robbie. However, she goes about it in more of a martyr fashion, just without the death. She is in nursing for all of the wrong reasons. Instead of going into it to help others, she is using it to punish herself. I found irony in this because hospitals are suppose to help you, but Briony is using the hospital as a form of torture for herself. If she were real she would make for a horrendous nurse. She is far to self centered to function properly in nurses position. Instead of worrying about patient and their injuries, she worries about whether or not she is carrying enough bedpans.
As a child, Briony wanted control over everything. Briony seemed to think that control was her ticket into the grown up world. To atone for her wrongdoing, Briony puts herself in an uncomfortable situation where she is powerless, she becomes a nurse. However Briony cannot resist power, she continues to control Robbie and Cecilia’s lives through her writing. She cannot leave them alone, she is obsessed and power hungry.
While I don’t forgive Briony for what she did, I do have to give her credit for the effort she’s putting into her atonement. To assess Briony’s actions fairly, I need to make a clear distinction between selfishness and self-centeredness. Briony is self-centered; her narration revolves around her, concerns her emotions, and expresses her opinions. Put simply, a chapter all about Briony is going to be all about Briony, regardless of how we judge her attitude or personality. Briony is not being selfish. Anything that involves cleaning bedpans can’t really be classified as selfish. She’s trying to separate herself from her past, physically and mentally. If nursing “delivered [her] from introspection,” (260), it’s really a win-win situation. She gets a break from the torment of her guilt and shame and the soldiers get their wounds treated.
Fiona isn’t crucial to the plot of the book, but her character provides some much-needed comic relief. I don’t know how she got herself into this position if something as simple as cutting fingernails is an ordeal for her. I think she represents someone holding on to childhood, while Briony is constantly trying to let it go.
Ok. I know everyone hates Briony and I kind of hate her too (actually, I don’t hate her--I hate what she did, but as far as people go she’s hardly evil), but I relate to her in many respects. I love the description of writing as “the thread of continuity.” That’s me, that’s my life. I know all too well that some mistakes are irreparable and that the simplest lie can have the most complicated unintended consequences. Writing doesn’t solve life’s problems, but it helps more than anything else I can think of. I can’t help but sympathize with Briony.
Part 3 immediately starts off setting the feeling of the coming pages with its initial description. It definitely sets itself apart from the other parts especially part 1 with its darker tone. This section mostly is about how bad Briony's life is going for her right now as she is training to become a nurse instead of going to college. The conditions that she is in during her training reminded me in some part as a parallel to what Robbie is going through during the war. "[Briony] had no will, no freedom to leave." She had cast herself into a situation similar to Robbie's I guess to make it better because she is experiencing hardship too. She apparently must believe that this could help to make up for the fact that she ruined her sister and Robbie's lives, but she still hasn't changed, and focuses on herself a lot. Even during what I think is the most important part of this section, the part about Lola's wedding, Briony believes that her and Paul Marshall are only able to get married because Briony had made it possible.
The nurse hierarchy reminded me of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” It says something about the compelling nature of this book because while I made that connection in my head, I thought, “well that book was written after this one,” and then remembered this was not written during World War II. The general fear of Sister Drummond was similar to that of Nurse Ratched. Briony is a nurse now and wants to be independent. This new goal to be independent has led her to limit the communication she has with her family. She says very little about work or how she is in her letters home. She does write what happens to her, but only to herself. Was wants to be a writer. She still wants control over everything, and she can do that while writing.
19 comments:
It’s kind of nice to have a change of pace again; although I like Robbie so much more as a character, I find the sections about Briony a bit less tedious to read. The hospital seems so awful and scary, and not like something that Briony would want to put up with at all; I thought it was sort of in character that Briony made so many mistakes because she’s just so spacey. It seemed like an environment she would never enjoy being in, but it was clear that submitting to all that tedium was her way of trying to pay for what she did. In becoming a mere number among a group of nurses, she is trying to strip herself of her identity and forget her past. Not only that, but the endless, tedious work helps her block out any thoughts whatsoever. This really made me feel bad for her; yes, she recognizes that she is “unforgivable” now, but naturally, coming from someone who was barely mad at her in the first place, I feel like she’s really putting herself through so much.
The environment both inside and outside of the hospital is miserable; there is no way Briony can escape it. She can either indulge the miserable, dull isolation that is her nurse’s training, or indulge the hectic life of all the civilians elsewhere whose lives are falling apart because of the war, and she seems to prefer the latter. On that note, it was almost astounding just how much Emily’s life has fallen apart; from the way it was described in the book, I can’t really tell how she feels about that fact, but it made me wonder if all the disaster was partly due to Cecelia’s being gone. And that makes me curious what her side of the story is at this point; obviously there’s no way to know if Emily has written to Cecelia as well, but I would imagine that the latter doesn’t care very much. (I feel like there’s some symbolic significance to Betty ‘breaking’ the vase, but I can’t think of anything right now.)
I was a little surprised when I found out that Briony was still writing stories, and basing them off of people like Sister Drummond, no less. Even though she has learned to stop basing her stories off of real people and events, I feel like doing a thing like that is still terribly risky and would think she would have realized that. Also, the scene where Briony was enjoying her freedom outside of the hospital seemed to be a direct parallel to Robbie’s enjoyment of his freedom outside of the jail. I think that’s interesting, though, because their situations are kind of opposite; Robbie’s suffering was completely unfair and against his control, but Briony not only (kind of) deserved what she got, but she was the one who put herself through the training in the first place. I’m not sure I understand why Briony loves the freedom of the outside world so much.
I like the idea of Jack possibly sending the letter about Lola and Paul’s marriage because he knew the truth all along. I’m looking forward to reading that scene and possibly getting more insight into Briony’s head.
Just like in Parts One and Two, Part Three undergoes another shift in literary style. While Part One, had this whole fairytale–like tone and surreal mood, and while Part Two wakes the reader up from the dream, and throws the reader into the middle of a war scene, Part Three is a mixture of surrealism and harsh reality. For starters, five years have gone by, and Briony is learning how to become a nurse. Just like how Part Two was a wake–up call for the readers, Briony herself experiences her own wake–up call, in which she is placed in an environment that will have lives hanging in the balance. Part Three catches the readers up on Briony’s life. She has declined the offer to go to school at Cambridge, to take up nursing, is struggling to get published and keeps limited contact with her parents. Just like how the theme of class struggle is emphasized throughout the novel, Briony experiences her own class struggle as a nurse. When training to become a nurse, Briony is given a name badge to wear with the wrong first initial, having the letter ‘N’ where a ‘B’ should be. “She had gone up to the sister to point out courteously that a mistake had been made with her name badge. She was B. Tallis, not, as it said on the little rectangular brooch, N. Tallis. The reply was calm. ‘You are, and will remain, as you have been designated. Your Christian name is of no interest to me. Now kindly sit down, Nurse Tallis.’ ” (Page 259). Even as a nurse, the Nursing Academy does not see class nor care about class. Nursing, for Briony has caused her to be without a class and even without her original name. Everything that we, the reader, has known about Briony Tallis is completely stripped. Briony is no longer apart of the upperclass, but is equal among the rest of the working class nurses. Briony has be reduced so lowly, that she can’t even tell her parents the details in which her working conditions have come to. In fact, Briony tells very little to her parents about her job as a nurse working in London. But the other big twist that happens in this section, is the news Briony receives from her father regarding Lola and Paul Marshall. The two are to be married, and Jack Tallis underscores the letter with “love as always,” and Briony reads into her father’s omniscient awareness into the fact that he may have known that Paul Marshall was the criminal that night instead of Robbie. “He gave no reason why he supposed she would want to know and made no comment on the matter himself. He simply signed off in a scrawl down the page – ‘love as always.’ . . . She wondered whether in sending his letter with its specific information he was trying to tell her that he knew the truth.” (Pages 268 – 269). It is nor clearly explained in the reading if Jack Tallis officially knew that it was Paul Marshall, but nevertheless, Briony experiences a wave a guilt, knowing full well that the rapist in fact was not and could never have been Robbie Turner.
Oh Briony. Her guilt is all consuming and seems to be the only thing she can write about. Never mind the waging war, never mind the wounded solider, I want to hear about Briony not carrying the right number of bedpans.
That said, it is interesting to read about the life of a WWII nurse. Briony experiences the uncertainty of war and the rigidity of hospital routines. Briony doesn't often venture outside the hospital walls, or even outside her head. She has created a new role for her self; she is no longer the heroine, she is the martyr. When she isn't punishing herself, she is thinking about how hard her life her, how much pain she causes herself. Briony doesn't think about how much pain she caused Robbie and Cecelia. By punishing herself, Briony doesn't relieve their pain. How can these acts help mend her broken bridges? No, Briony plays the part of self-involved martyr very well.
This part of the book was so frustrating for me. I cannot stand Briony at all. She's so freaking stuck up and self centered and just wrong it pisses me off. While I try and feel bad for her being yelled at by the head nurse and cleaning out bedpans I can't really say I feel bad for her at all. Maybe I would be able to find a little bit of compassion if she was more aware of her crimes and had at least admitted to other people that she had been wrong. But instead she just does the complete opposite and just pines around saying poor old me look at all the bad things that happened to me I'm the one you should really care about. I can't even see her choice to leave college and support the war effort by being a nurse as a kind of atonement because she doesn't solve anything except her own wounded ego. Briony doesn't really seemed to have learned much from her experiences as a ten year old but perhaps after going through many hardships she is able to think about something else besides herself and write her novel of atonement.
Well back to Briony and her self-pitying, and self-flagellating attitude. She feels the need to repent for what she did to Robbie, and rightly so, but the way she is atoning just seems wrong to me. What she wants is to feel pain and suffering for what she did, but what she should be doing is working to help others to make amends for what she did. Atonement isn’t about punishing yourself it’s about making amends for your wrong doings. Briony’s egocentric attitude causes her to twist this idea of atoning into a self centered punishment, rather than an opportunity to become a more virtuous person. I had truly hoped that I would be able to feel forgiveness toward Briony because of her desire to atone, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel sympathetic to someone who twists every to become part of her own egomaniacal fantasy even if they had the best intentions.
In this chapter, Briony has become a nurse in order to find forgiveness for her crime. She has gone from being free spirited to being in a strict environment with plenty of discipline. In this environment she finds it hard to write but sometimes she can't help it. She is able to go back into the writer's environment and create a story using real people. What I did find funny in this chapter was that the vase that began Robbie's and Cecilia's affair was finally completely broken. I just found it funny that Betty was blamed but a bit upset that now they will never know that Cecilia and Robbie's affections were shown when arguing about the vase.
When Briony's father sends her a letter saying that Lola was to marry Paul Marshall. I was astounded that Lola would marry her rapist.
During the process of her atonement, Briony reverses the social scene at the hospital. Where she used to be served and doted on, she now becomes the servant. Briony’s identity is compromised – she is to be called “Nurse Tallis.” She is taken for granted, and she’s hired to follow orders: this opposes her own desire for control at the beginning of the novel. The drastic change of her environment is demeaning, yet she takes every humiliating action to serve as her punishment for her crime. In my opinion, she’s too focused on her own desire for atonement, instead of focusing on helping those around her to the best of her abilities.
The beginning of this reading is the constant build up for all the retreating soldiers. Briony is instructed to clean, make beds, and clean some more. “The war against germs never ceased” (pg 256). The nurses are trying to minimize the casualties of disease as they work their hands to the bone. Later in the reading Briony receives a letter from home updating her on all current news back there. The most interesting news she receives is the news that her uncle’s vase has been shattered. This symbolizes the fact that Robbie and Cecilia’s relations ship has been destroyed with no repair (because Robbie is dead). At the end of the reading, “The British army in northern France was “making strategic withdrawals”” and the hospital is getting loads of supplies to care for all of the troops that are coming.
Five years after her crime, Briony is working as a nurse as a form of penance. She's not enjoying herself at all, yet she feels like she has to stay there, as though this will make everything better. Not much happened that was noteworthy in this section; my favorite part, though, was the letter from Jack. He told Briony that Betty dropped and broke THE vase. The same one Cecilia and Robbie broke in the beginning. I loved all the symbolism with this - another person getting blamed for something they didn't do. We also find out that Lola and Paul are getting married, and Briony admits that she is the one who made it possible. I think the most important line in this section is "...she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable." (pg. 269). I like seeing how Briony has grown up - she's not a kid anymore, and she knows that she screwed up Robbie and Cecilia's lives.
So we're back to Briony now. It's five years later, and she is working on becoming a nurse. She is trying to atone for when she did, but she's going about it the wrong way. Everything has to be about her, and this is certainly no exception. She's not becoming a nurse to help other people. She's becoming a nurse to punish herself in hopes that it will make her feel better. She's turning something as selfless as being a nurse into a selfish punishment. She's too self centered. She even freaks out about having the wrong initial on her name tag. She is surrounded by dying soldiers who are afraid and in pain, and she can't get over having one wrong letter on her name tag. It's a name that she cant even use anyway.
She also gets a letter from her father informing her that Paul and Lola will be married soon.
In part three, we have another total setting change. We are suddenly many years later and Briony is trying to become a nurse. In this section, Briony continues to be completely self centered and only cares about herself. She becomes a nurse to try and atone for what she did to Robbie, yet she seems to care less about what she actually did to Robbie and more about not wanting to think about it. I got the sense that Briony thought that if she put herself through enough pain and suffering, she would magically become not guilty, which is not quite how it works.
There were times throughout this reading where I started to feel a little sympathy for Briony. She had made one mistake when she was still a child and not only did it screw up everyone else’s lives, it screwed up her life too. But whenever I started to feel bad for her, she would say something that just made me hate her even more. She worked in a hospital with hundreds of dying soldiers, yet at some points all Briony was thinking about was how she was not carrying enough bedpans.
On page 269, she comes the closest she will ever come to being atoned for what she did. “She paused outside…. Perhaps weeks.” This paragraph reminds the reader of spring, which is the season of rebirth and this small glimpse of the outside world is the closest Briony comes to being reborn.
So this section is where we get our first look at "grown up" Briony. She is only eighteen which means only five years have passed but it seems that something has changed within her. All of the descriptions of her actions and surroundings seem so cold and unfeeling. It makes sense since they are in a hospital; everything being so....sterile. Though it may seem blasphemous or whatever, but I felt that I could see some parallels between Briony's and Robbie's situations. Especially because the nurses, like the soldiers, go by their last name. This procedure prevents the patients from getting to familiar with or attached to the nurses and the nurses to the patients likewise. This feeds into Briony's appearance as this fumbling robot. One line that demonstrates
Briony's newfound distance with her parents is "It seemed theatrical to Briony, and ridiculous, grown young women tearful for their mothers, or as one of the students put it through her sobs, for the smell of Daddy's pipe," p261. To me it feels like this line is supposed to prove to us that she is grown up, but really it is almost a necessity because if she showed any longing to be with her parent we, as a reader, would hate her even more.
Besides these previously mentioned things, nothing overly dramatic happens in this section. It is mostly Briony's time as a nurse. The one big thing was the fact that Paul Marshall and Lola were getting married. Imagine seeing that in print. Holy moly! That would have been shocking and puzzling, and quite frankly infuriating. The odd thing is that I didn't feel that reaction form Briony. She just felt the slow quiet guilt seep into her pores as she pondered the wedding. "She was unforgivable," (p269)
We have returned to a Briony narrative, it is approximately set five years later, and Briony is undergoing nurse training. Briony's fanciful way of life has been stripped away and she is now forced to see reality as it is. I can understand why she chose nursing as a form of personal punishment. It's a way of being able to help those whose lives are in great distress. Yet nursing is not enough to revoke Briony's guilt. As she goes about her daily duties, all of which are very orderly and precise, Briony is consumed by thoughts of guilt."Briony felt her familiar guilt pursue her with a novel vibrancy."(268)
In my opinion, Briony is extremely Introspective. Her narrative goes back and forth from Briony's personal selfish thoughts and feelings of guilt to the hospital which is filled with death and sickness. Clearly her heart isn't in nursing. Doesn't it seem more practical for Briony to confront Robbie and Cecilia head on rather than dealing with her guilt ineffectively?
This is where Briony begins her atonement. She cleans, scrubbing her hands raw, she follows direction to the Q to the point of worrying about everything she does. Which is very un-Briony. This she believes is her atonement, her way of paying for what she did. Of course instead of doing what she should of done which is tell the truth. Doing this she believes she can maybe not allow robbie and cecilia to forgive her but for her to forgive herself. Throughout this part in the story all shes worried about is her performance. This is obnoxious because what she should be concerned with is the patients.
In part three Briony is attempting to atone for the wrong she did to both her sister and Robbie. However, she goes about it in more of a martyr fashion, just without the death. She is in nursing for all of the wrong reasons. Instead of going into it to help others, she is using it to punish herself. I found irony in this because hospitals are suppose to help you, but Briony is using the hospital as a form of torture for herself. If she were real she would make for a horrendous nurse. She is far to self centered to function properly in nurses position. Instead of worrying about patient and their injuries, she worries about whether or not she is carrying enough bedpans.
As a child, Briony wanted control over everything. Briony seemed to think that control was her ticket into the grown up world. To atone for her wrongdoing, Briony puts herself in an uncomfortable situation where she is powerless, she becomes a nurse. However Briony cannot resist power, she continues to control Robbie and Cecilia’s lives through her writing. She cannot leave them alone, she is obsessed and power hungry.
While I don’t forgive Briony for what she did, I do have to give her credit for the effort she’s putting into her atonement. To assess Briony’s actions fairly, I need to make a clear distinction between selfishness and self-centeredness. Briony is self-centered; her narration revolves around her, concerns her emotions, and expresses her opinions. Put simply, a chapter all about Briony is going to be all about Briony, regardless of how we judge her attitude or personality. Briony is not being selfish. Anything that involves cleaning bedpans can’t really be classified as selfish. She’s trying to separate herself from her past, physically and mentally. If nursing “delivered [her] from introspection,” (260), it’s really a win-win situation. She gets a break from the torment of her guilt and shame and the soldiers get their wounds treated.
Fiona isn’t crucial to the plot of the book, but her character provides some much-needed comic relief. I don’t know how she got herself into this position if something as simple as cutting fingernails is an ordeal for her. I think she represents someone holding on to childhood, while Briony is constantly trying to let it go.
Ok. I know everyone hates Briony and I kind of hate her too (actually, I don’t hate her--I hate what she did, but as far as people go she’s hardly evil), but I relate to her in many respects. I love the description of writing as “the thread of continuity.” That’s me, that’s my life. I know all too well that some mistakes are irreparable and that the simplest lie can have the most complicated unintended consequences. Writing doesn’t solve life’s problems, but it helps more than anything else I can think of. I can’t help but sympathize with Briony.
Part 3 immediately starts off setting the feeling of the coming pages with its initial description. It definitely sets itself apart from the other parts especially part 1 with its darker tone. This section mostly is about how bad Briony's life is going for her right now as she is training to become a nurse instead of going to college. The conditions that she is in during her training reminded me in some part as a parallel to what Robbie is going through during the war. "[Briony] had no will, no freedom to leave." She had cast herself into a situation similar to Robbie's I guess to make it better because she is experiencing hardship too. She apparently must believe that this could help to make up for the fact that she ruined her sister and Robbie's lives, but she still hasn't changed, and focuses on herself a lot. Even during what I think is the most important part of this section, the part about Lola's wedding, Briony believes that her and Paul Marshall are only able to get married because Briony had made it possible.
The nurse hierarchy reminded me of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” It says something about the compelling nature of this book because while I made that connection in my head, I thought, “well that book was written after this one,” and then remembered this was not written during World War II. The general fear of Sister Drummond was similar to that of Nurse Ratched. Briony is a nurse now and wants to be independent. This new goal to be independent has led her to limit the communication she has with her family. She says very little about work or how she is in her letters home. She does write what happens to her, but only to herself. Was wants to be a writer. She still wants control over everything, and she can do that while writing.
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