absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her . . . No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

At this point in the novel, we learn that the relatively happy ending that we just read at the end of part three—Briony is able to reunite with Cecilia and Robbie and admit what she did and profess her guilt—did not actually occur. Both Cecilia and Robbie were killed during the war. Briony never was able to confess her guilt and be forgiven by those she hurt so deeply; Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again after Briony's fateful (and false) accusation against Robbie.

In other words, Briony was never able to atone by asking the forgiveness of Robbie and Cecilia. She says, in the previous quoted passage, that she can attempt to achieve atonement through her novel, but she really never can, because the only one who can recuse her is herself. That makes the whole project of atonement rather unfair.

It could be argued that, despite Briony's reasoning, she achieves some form of atonement, because her novel depicts her in a fairly unsympathetic light, and she admits that she was wrong in the work of fiction. But the fact that Briony herself questions whether that is enough—after all, she cannot undo the harm she's done—makes the reader question whether she has achieved her goal.

In Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, Briony Tallis herself is honest with the reader about her need for a happy ending, whether it take the form of a conclusion to her childish play "The Trials of Arabella," or the rewriting of the past that is the novel itself. Briony's imagined re-creation of the life Robbie and Cecilia should have had together, had Briony not ruined their chances for it, is the happy ending she longs for; the story Briony tells in the novel, combined with her confession that the story is all an idealized fiction, is her atonement.

The question of Briony's success is really up to the reader, which is the author's intention. The reader must decide for him or herself if the impetuous mistake of a immature and attention-seeking child warrants harsh judgment or leniency. The difficult nature of this issue exists in the outcome of young Briony's error--did she know that her accusation would ruin innocent lives? And is her age relevant to the answer to that question? And do the tragedies of the war make Briony more of a villain or less?

Whether or not Briony is successful in her atonement is indeed a challenging question, but these kinds of literary moral ambiguities leave no doubt as to why McEwan is such a successful novelist.

One of the major question raised by Ian McEwan`s novel, Atonement, is whether Briony Tallis does, in fact, atone in any way for her earlier false accusation of Robbie as a rapist. Some of whether we consider her to have atoned has to do with how much we understand atonement in its strict religious sense, in which Jesus` death atoned for original sin, but actual sin required repentance, confession, and specific forms of penance, with God ultimately responsible for absolution. The possibility of absolution depends on the sincerity of Briony’s repentance, whether the confession is real or imagined (the vexed status of the novel makes it complex), and whether her acts of penance are sufficient. McEwan seems to be making the point with the ambivalence of much of the ending that we cannot know, something that fits the theological model in which only God can judge the truths of the human heart.