In Atonement, McEwan reveals in the final section, "London, 1999", that the previous narrative was a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and putting discussion all previous events that the reader had believed to be objectively true. McEwan first signals this change through the shift to the first-person perspective of Briony as a seventy-seven-year-old woman, and through vague references to her current novel. He finally discusses directly his "last novel, the one that should have been (his) first" and his topic "our crime: Lola's, Marshall's, mine," both statements revealing the guilt that it haunted her and led her to create so many drafts of her retelling over fifty-nine years. His attempt to gain sympathy is targeted, but limited. More or less the same approach to the themes of art and empathy emerges in another current-oriented novel by McEwan, Saturday: here the textual and literary art forms lead the characters towards states of slightly more understanding. large, but also paradoxically serve to reveal lapses in empathy. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay McEwan implies that the optimistic ending of the penultimate section is also false. Briony admits that "it is only in this last version that my lovers end well", and that she chose this ending because she sees no point in telling a reader that "Robbie Turner died of septicemia in Bray Dunes" or that " Cecilia was killed in September of that year by the bomb that destroyed Balham tube station. These revelations accentuate the mistake she made as a child, as her misunderstanding cost them all the time they would have had, rather than just it. years of the life they would have spent together. The purpose of the "art" in the form of the novel that Briony has written is now to atone for her past crime – a lack of empathy and understanding – by attempting to empathize with Cecilia and Robbie by writing them. McEwan later wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 that "Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the heart of our humanity", so this creative endeavor is his attempt to repay a moral debt and give "to my lovers". 'the happy ending they never experienced in reality. The art in Atonement is often not a perfect conduit for empathy in its truest form, however, as indicated by the possessive "my lovers": she speaks as if she created them herself and I still can't imagine them as people separated from her. McEwan introduces the novel with an epigraph from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, where Henry Tilney berates Catherine Morland for her extravagant suspicions aroused by a love of Gothic literature and an overactive imagination. In the last section, the older Briony takes on the role of Tilney by dismissing her younger self as a "busy, self-important, presumptuous little girl" while watching the play she had written, as the presence of literature in the younger girl's life makes her he encouraged. treating the people around her as characters to be directed or written. His affinity for "miniature" as a young man represents a desire to move and control others through the process of pretense, rather than a desire toward "telepathy" through pretense. describes in the first chapter the term supernatural which reflects its impossibility. This compulsion to move others as he wishes could corrupt his ability to atone through a novel, as changing the ending could be a moral choice for their memory andfor the reader, but it could also be an attempt to personally absolve herself since it's just her. responsible for the years lost together rather than the lives lost. The deception involved is a reminder of her original mistake, and she too admits that in the latest draft of her novel 'she hasn't traveled so far after all, since I wrote my little play' (referring to the constructed happy ending). While Briony chides if herself as a young woman, she still recognizes that by positioning herself as the author and giving herself the "absolute power to decide the outcomes," she has complicated her attempt at empathy since she has become God-like with that "absolute power" and there is no one to forgive her except herself The art still allows her to imagine an empathy with Cecilia and Robbie, but the solipsism of the art form itself and its definition of the ending prevents true "Atonement": her empathy is misguided and ultimately misguided. , not enough. McEwan wrote the novel Saturday in 2003 in reaction to the shock of September 11 and what he saw as a crime of insufficient empathy, as the central character's professionally comfortable and personally happy life is interrupted by unexpected violence. His reaction to the September 11 attacks in London in The Guardian conveyed the shock of these terrorist attacks reaching the Western world: 'We have been wildly awakened from a pleasant dream. The city will not recover the confidence and joy of Wednesday for a long time.' When violence intrudes into the Perowne home, similarly, Henry is awakening from a "dream interlude" of his own. The political repercussions of the real-world event are present in the background leading up to the Perownes' personal attack, but Henry does not appear to be strongly empathetic towards foreign struggles. When he and Daisy argue, he is aware that he is only responding to her adversarial tone and that "they are fighting for armies they will never see, that they know nothing about." In an unconscious fulfillment of Theo's advice to "think small" and avoid acknowledging global suffering, Henry's sense of empathy extends only to his family. He can't fully imagine the protesters' motivations, but listening to his son Theo's song, he is inspired toward ideological unity like the one the protesters yearn for: "There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than than they have ever found before." in rehearsals or performances, beyond the merely collaborative or technically competent aspect, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. It is then that they give us a glimpse of what we could be, of the best of ourselves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself... Christ's Kingdom on Earth , the workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state." (p 176) The 'Islamic State' is still left to the end of that triadic thought and structure, almost like an obscure joke or an inaccessible example that must be introduced by gradual escalations, but the art produced by his son allows the character of Henry to almost experience an ideally united movement. This empathy is not inherent to the character; it is produced by the camaraderie of the band, by the artistic medium and by his emotional bond with his son Being a scientific and non-literary man, however, he is unable to connect through his daughter's literary medium. In the scene where Daisy reads the poem "Dover Beach", a powerful empathy clearly influences Baxter even though McEwan writes from the point. of Henry's view that he is confused and separated by this connection. The physical changes that Henry notes, such as "the peculiar sagging angle of his spine," demonstrate that he has been physically stopped by.