Atoning for my lack of blogs

I'll start off by saying that I think I passed an unfair judgement on McEwan when I said earlier that I thought he was more of a novelist than a writer.
As I was tinkering with one of my many, many, (many, ad nauseum) unfinished short stories for a writing portfolio, I was also toying with the idea of asking for some advice on where to go with the story, how it was sounding so far, etc. After a brief period of hesitation, I began to think about the way Briony described the sensation, the feeling of apprehension, she got as she was working on her stories. "Self exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?" So much like Briony, I knew that no matter how much I had to struggle with my story, I would not risk that sort of self exposure. (Not, at least, until the story was finished).
The fact that I resonated so strongly to this passage led me to thinking that it wasn't really Briony's feeling I was relating to, but McEwan's. (Oh yeah...Briony isn't even real.) I realized that this was a sort of "confession", if you will, from McEwan, through use of Briony, about his own writing process. A "please don't judge me too harshly", perhaps. But that's exactly what I did. So now, this is me revoking my judgement (though keeping my suspicions...). Sorry, Mr. McEwan.

Anyway, like all realizations, this only led my mind down another path to be unsure of. Or rather, this one led me back to a path, because this is something I frequently think about while reading. (ESPECIALLY when I was reading You Shall Know Our Velocity!, which I'm sure I'll get around to talking about...) Actually, I'll just start off with YSKOV as an example.
Every time Dave Eggars (the author) introduced a new character- the French woman they swim with, Raymond, who is a man they meet in Senegal- they seemed to exist solely to deliver a message that perhaps Eggars, or his main character Will, could not deliver themselves. (Or at least to provide them an opportunity to do so) Maybe they were a real person, who really spoke those words. I don't know. But that's exactly my point. How much of this is coming from the author him/herself? Are they just breaking themselves into little pieces and then giving those pieces names, roles, characterizations? Sure, the situation the characters are in might be based on fact, but was the dialog really external, or more of an internal representation of how the author would have perceived the situation if all of it's participants really were only two-dimensional;-- figments of his own imagination? Or maybe how things should have gone? As a reader, I constantly ask myself these questions, along with many others.
But Atonement offered an even more challenging example. After completing the book, I was left not with one author's verisimilitude to question, but two! The reliability was twice removed from this story, and I'm left with two psyches to analyze. I could give Ian McEwan a hard time again and say something like "Maybe that was simply McEwan removing himself once more from the story", but that's just cruel, and I've never read anything else he's written, so I have no real basis for saying that anyway.

FINALLY, I have arrived at Briony and her narrative, which is in reality almost the entire book. It turns out all of those questions I've asked myself are really going to come in handy when analyzing the text, namely Robbie and Cecilia. (I say "turns out" as if I'm surprised) All of our knowns about Briony, the keys to figuring her out, so to speak, are given to us at the introduction and conclusion of the novel. The introduction allows us to view her personality before the event- the way her mind understood and dealt with the world around her- and the conclusion shows us, after all this time has passed, what remains important to her. The rest in between is all guesswork, but at least we have these two things to work off of.

This is an incredibly long post, and I've got to finish my second draft of S&F. Stay tuned for the (equally long-winded, I'm sure) conclusion.