This almost narcissistic sense of superiority suggests that she fully and completely believes that she is “all-knowing”, diverging from the manner in which another character, Briony, is unreliable in the latter’s case, throughout the novel she appears deep down in the core of her character to be aware of her own unreliability but faces an internal struggle in admitting it to herself and others, as is later revealed in the great regret she shows during her atonement for falsely accusing Robbie. Within this scene there is an apparent tone of arrogance for example, “what to others would have been a muffling was to her alert senses, which were fine-tuned like the cat’s whiskers of a old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification”. It can then be further added that Emily is unreliable in rather a unique way as shown by the particular language used in the focalisation of her thoughts.
Given this outcome, the evidence then further points at Emily being an unreliable narrator, as her version of events differs vastly to those experienced by other seemingly more reliable characters, such as Cecilia, who knows that Robbie had been wrongly accused and is innocent. This miscalculation proves that Emily is far from right in thinking herself “all-knowing”, and in fact provides evidence that she is living in her own warped version of reality.
One particular scene which clearly demonstrates this is when she decided to believe Briony’s false accusation of Robbie as a rapist she fails to consider her berserk imagination and her tendency to embellish truth. However, her presumptive assuredness has proven to be false in the later stages of the novel. For example, in one of the paragraphs, Emily considers herself possessing “a sixth sense, a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved through the house, unseen and all-knowing.” This can be perceived as Emily arrogantly believing that she knows her children in extensive detail – “only the truth”. For example, in chapter 6, while Cecilia (Emily Tallis’ mother) is reminiscing about her children, the paragraphs are entirely written in third person however, the technique of focalisation filters the narration through Emily’s perspective, allowing the audience to gain an insight into her thoughts, which then enables readers to be able to identify some of these thought processes as distorted truth.
Atonement cleverly engages the reader through a prism of first and third person perspectives, enabling the themes of truth and memory to be explored via focalisation and reliability.
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