Robbie Turner from Atonement - Research Paper Example

?Home At Heart When we meet Robbie Turner in the novel “Atonement,” he is a young man that’s been recently awarded with a Cambridge degree and a freshly inspired vision for life. The humble son of a single mom, they have worked for the Tallis family since his father abandoned them without even a note goodbye when he was six. He spends his life caring for his mom, befriending the Tallis children Leon, Cecilia and Briony and earning the respect of Mr. Tallis, who acts as a sort of godfather to him financing his academic pursuits. McEwan describes Robbie as inexplicably optimistic suddenly certain there laid a new adventure ahead. “He was happy and therefore bound to succeed. One word contained everything he felt: Freedom. Now, finally, with the exercise of will, his adult life had begun. There was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero.” (McEwan, 115-116). This story was for him to attend medical school. Not because medicine was his greatest passion although it would benefit him with prodigious skills and satisfy his practical nature. Robbie was about to make his own decision, and this above all else was the beauty of his aspiration. “He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.” (McEwan, 117). This invigorating time of youth and all its vast potential is where we meet Robbie and we embark with him as he sets out on his journey of promise. He has carried himself on his hard work and good reputation for so long that it is to be expected Robbie will be successful in his exceptional endeavors and rise higher than Leon Tallis, the boy of wealth and good fortune who lacks the ambition or desire to put to noble use the advantages with which he’s been provided. At this time of awakening purpose, perhaps the biggest self-discovery in Robbie is that he has fallen in love. Robbie has become very awkward and uncomfortable around Cecilia Tallis the girl who was first a childhood friend, an almost sister. They hardly talk anymore and when they do their exchanges are blocked with layers of unclear meanings and hidden feelings. The scene in the novel when Robbie and Cecilia are by the fountain is a lovely illustration of the long brewing tension between them. Cecilia goes to the fountain to fill the family’s cherished vase with water for the flowers and he has offered to help her. They quarrel over him going to medical school. When she makes the comment that her father will be paying for it his pride is hurt and he retorts that he will pay the money back. She is not angry any financial expense, but at the cost of his leaving. They struggle over the vase and he breaks it losing a piece in the water. Angrily she removes her clothes in front him, dives in and retrieves the missing piece. She steps out of the water and redresses leaving him overtaken with longing for her. “He stood up at last from his bath, shivering, in no doubt that a great change was coming over him.” (McEwan, 101). Stirred by this great change within him Robbie writes a couple of letters to Cecilia, the one unintended to be given, articulating his sexual yearning for her. Following the lines of a good plot, the wrong letter is delivered to her by her younger sister Briony, who has also witnessed the fountain display of her sister removing her clothes. The fountain incident compels Briony to read the letter, more sexually explicit than her thirteen years can comprehend. A short while after delivering the letter to her sister, she walks in on Robbie and Cecilia making love in the library that night at the family dinner party. “He discovered he had never hated anyone until now. There was no good reason why she should be in the library, except to find him and deny him what was his.” (McEwan, 177). Robbie and Cecilia exchange vows of love and by the time dinner is served, Robbie has nearly savored the sweetest dessert of his entire life. In the course of dinner it is discovered, Jackson and Pierrot, cousins of the Tallis family have left a note and run away. Robbie is dismayed at this turn of events. “His first reaction was that he had been cheated. The vastness of the night beyond the house, the dark trees, the welcoming shadows, the cool new-mown grass- all this had been reserved, he had designated it as belonging exclusively to himself and Cecilia.” (McEwan, 183). It was but a moment of belonging for Robbie and Cecilia. The moment of bliss in the library was theirs and would be reclaimed by them both many times in the years to follow in memory. When Robbie left the house to go out searching for the twins he did so with the conviction “nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospects of my hopes.” (McEwan, 166). When he arrived back at the house with the twins in his arms he did not receive the hero’s welcome he deserved. He was no longer the hero of his own story, but the villain of someone else’s. Ironically, when Robbie brings the missing twins home, he becomes as McEwan describes “the vanished boy of a vanished life.” (McEwan, 258). After setting out on his vision quest for manhood, this is what Robbie becomes the second half of the story. What happened in the story is that Briony tells her cousin Lola about Robbie’s letter to her sister and hints at the scandalous acts she has witnessed between them at the fountain and library. Then when the search outdoors is conducted for the twins, Lola is raped by a man she claims not to have seen and Briony tells her family and the police it was Robbie who was Lola’s attacker. Robbie brings home the twins and then is arrested and imprisoned for three and a half years before being given the choice to either continue in jail, or join the army. The long nights in prison were a torment for Robbie as he replayed over and over again the brief encounter of ecstasy he and Cecilia shared in the library. He was psychologically diagnosed as “morbidly oversexed” and ordered not to be stimulated at all. Every correspondence of his and Cecilia’s had to be examined to ensure no stimulation ensued and so they invented and spoke in code to each other to demonstrate desire. How inaccurate this psychological diagnosis of him was. Robbie labeled as morbidly oversexed when he had only one interrupted night of passion! Robbie was “in love with her, willing himself to stay sane for her.” (McEwan, 260). According to McEwan, prison makes Robbie despise himself. “Three and a half years of nights like these, unable to sleep, thinking of another vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own, and waiting for dawn, and slop-out and another wasted day. He did not know how he survived the daily stupidity of it.” (McEwan, 258). Robbie and all that he was, his ideals, his good intentions and his aspirations were being wasted and Robbie knew this. What despair he must have felt, having so much to offer and so much life in him and no way out. What regret and loss he must have encountered. The burden of regret weighed on him not because he did something wrong, but the regret of a lost chance, of being robbed of life and time. How little consolation he must have found in the fact he did nothing wrong, to be so oppressed by everyone else believing that he did. Robbie and Cecilia’s meeting in Whitehall is their last and final meeting. The refreshed hope in Robbie at this time is heartbreakingly innocent. He and Cecilia have plans to meet again at a cottage on the coast but the demands of war separate them, yet Robbie perseveres through it all, Cecilia being the light at the end of his tunnel he is traveling through. In a letter Cecilia tells him she has heard news of Briony. After Robbie was taken away by the police, Cecilia has completely cut herself off from her family. But Briony implies in her letter to Cecilia that she wishes to make things right, that she feels the consequence of what she has done. When Robbie learns this, his spirit, the same spirit he had at the story’s beginning returns to him. “That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The prospect was of a rebirth, a triumphant return. He could become again the man who had once crossed a Surrey park at dusk in his best suit, swaggering on the promise of life, who had entered the house and with the clarity of passion had made love to Cecilia. The story could resume the one that he has been planning on that evening walk. He and Cecilia would no longer be isolated. Their love would have space and society to grow in. He would not go about cap in hand to collect apologies from friends who had shunned him. Nor would he sit back, proud and fierce, shunning them in return. He knew exactly how he would behave. He would simply resume. With his criminal record struck off, he could apply to medical school. If Cecilia made her peace with her family, he could keep his distance without seeming sour. He would be cleared. To be cleared would be a pure state. He dreamed of it like a lover, with a simple longing. Let his name be cleared, then let everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in the time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her, and live without shame.” (McEwan, 290-292). Robbie is absolutely a remarkable man. This paper is to reflect on his psychological state and every reader must be inspired by his soundness of mind. After everything he has gone through, all the trials and tribulations he has faced, we see a man who knows exactly what is important, with an impeccable and unaffected priority and crystal clear view on life. At the start of the novel he was establishing his purpose. In life many times we are obstructed off course and we find it still. We come back. That was the phrase Cecilia always used with him, even when he was first taken away she said “come back to me” and then every letter to him she ends with that phrase “come back to me.” This perhaps encourages Robbie at those momentary lapses when his strength wavered and his pristine view got hazed over in the fog of bitterness. How steadfast and decent Robbie remained throughout the entire story. His generous nature and the depth of love he had for Cecilia troubled him she was not on good terms with her family. He felt the burden “that she was destroying a part of herself for his sake.” (McEwan, 266). This demonstrates the richness of his love for Cecilia that she is more important to him, than even the hell her family has put him through. Robbie is human, and he felt hatred for Briony but was an honorable man with intelligent understanding that this hatred was not reasonable. Robbie is wounded in the war and as the novel nears its end we see how tired he is becoming. He is tired, hungry and parched with thirst. This thirst for water now towards the end of the story is I believe also a lovely symbolism to the thirst he had been parched with since we first met him, the thirst for life. “Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I’ll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it. His most sensual memories-their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall.” (McEwan, 289). This is what drove Robbie on to the end. “And there was hope. I’ll wait for you. Come back. There was a chance, just a chance, of getting back. He had her last letter in his pocket and her new address. This was why he had to survive.” (McEwan, 258). “I’ll wait for you was elemental. It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back. She meant it. Time would show she really meant it. He said to her simply that he would not forget this, by which he meant to tell her how grateful he was, especially then, especially now. (McEwan, 340). Cecilia’s love saved Robbie’s life many times. As Robbie becomes more tired, his thoughts about guilt and its implications change. “He forced his thoughts toward the new situation that was supposed to make him happy. The intricacies were lost to him, the urgency had died. Briony would change her evidence, she would rewrite the past so that the guilty became innocent. But what was guilty these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. The witnesses were guilty too. All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence.” (McEwan, 336-337). I think Robbie realizes that even his absolution would not set everything to right. He comprehends that there will never be enough witnesses and pens and papers and ears to set every record straight. Maybe he grasps that living truthfully to ourselves is the best in this life we can do. And he has done that. He really was the hero of his own story. He set out that summer evening he went were no one else went and he brought back the twins Jackson and Pierrot. “He was in love, with Cecilia, with the twins, with success and the dawn and its curious glowing mist.” (McEwan, 337). We embarked with him on his journey of promise; he was a boy of lesser circumstances but no chip on his shoulder, no bitterness or arrogant belief about him that life owed him more than it had given. Robbie was sweet and genuine and he remains so throughout the novel. His experiences do not harden him. They only serve to show us, as well as himself what a fine man he was turning into. He had beautiful dreams for his life, dreams that should have come true. But the fact that he dreamt until his last breath is consolation his life was not misspent by his own device. He dies of his wound, which becomes infected. Cecilia also dies in the war. They never meet again in this side of life, but maybe in the next they will. They did not physically survive the war, but I proclaim their own personal war they conquered, they won, they triumphed. Robbie stayed strong until the very end. He never became a victim of his circumstances. He faced being outcast, prison, war, and he never lost his dream of going home to Cecilia. He ran, he walked, and he crawled when he had to through that tunnel with the light of life and Cecilia’s love at the end of it. In conclusion I would like to quote a passage McEwan writes pertaining to Briony, but I believe so essential to Robbie and his being. “The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. It was difficult to come back. It was at the moment of return that the loss became so evident. And now he was back in the world, not one he could make, but the one that made him.” (McEwan, 97-98). Works Cited Grooms, R. Greg. Ransom Fellowship. Atonement. (2000). Mathews, Peter. Academia. The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement. (Mar 2006). McEwan, Ian. Atonement. Anchor Books, 2001. Read More