Who Killed Robbie and Cecilia? Reading and Misreading Ian McEwan's Atonement

Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, Atonement, is seen by many as a meditation on misreading, and this article argues that the author not only dramatizes misreading and implicitly warns readers against misreading, but also induces his readers into misreading. Although critics of the novel claim that Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis die during World War II, in fact the book not only offers no explicit statement of their deaths, but also offers good reasons to believe that they did not die. Readers who believe in their deaths, then, are seen to commit the same sort of misreading as does the novel's narrator: this narrator's misreading causes Turner and Tallis great suffering, and the misreading by readers of Atonement ocauseso these characters' deaths. Reinforcing McEwan's warning against misreading, then, is the novel's illustration of how easy it is to misread.