Deprived of protection: The ethico-politics of authorship in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Abstract The paper proposes to read the British novelist Ian McEwan as an ethically disconcerted post-imperial writer. His early works “gave voice to an anxiety about social, cultural and moral decline after the end of Britain’s imperial power had become vividly apparent” (Groes). Both the writer’s and his characters’ fatherless post-war childhoods testify to the systematic disconnection of the public and private in the late imperial and post-imperial country, which induced the growing feeling of unprotectedness among its inhabitants. McEwan consistently searches for an ethically responsible literary form to cope with the traumatic defenselessness that, much beyond post-imperial Britain, became the experience of both the recent world and literature. In this search, he develops a peculiar technology of his authorial self. By tending to provide a shelter to the defenseless characters, it reproduces the protective attitude of these characters toward the other characters. However, the author simultaneously exposes their remorseful attachment to the victims as selfish. As he thus never stops ethically exempting himself from his Doppelgängers, he continuously wrong-foots the reader. In sum, Atonement draws its characters, narrator, author, and readers into a frenetic pursuit of the final ethical truth by repeatedly entrapping them in this truth’s provisional political surrogates.