The character in the novel by Ian McEwan: between guilt and the desire to repair

Abstract

This article aimed at establishing to analyze the fictional character Briony Tallis and how to occur her action in the novel Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan. In the novel, the main character influenced by her imaginative mind and a misunderstood reading, lives a drama and trying to repair a mistake made in the past. For that, we used theoretical assumptions by Krause (2010), about the metaficcion; Rosenfeld (1969, 1976), Candido (1976), Forster (2005), Reis (2001), Miguel (2016), about the the fictional character; Reis & Lopes (1988) e Friedman (2002), about the narrative focus and the voice of the narrator. This work showed that Ian McEwan shows, through the protagonist, the art of literature to allow a possible identification of humans with fictional characters.