“Blood, sand, mud, oil, sea water, engine grease, bullets and the smell of cordite, whose pockets contained a dry loaf of bread” (P. 407)

It has a metafiction efficiency, which means it is a story within a story. The incident occurred in the past, according to the protagonist Briony, in the final section of the novel titled 'England 1999.' The novel contains another story, which begins with a 13-year-old narrator Briony Tallis describing the schmaltzy ambience and ends with a 77-year-old Briony Tallis.
2. Pastiche- Pastiche, which is related to postmodern intertextuality, means to merge or "paste" around each other with multiple components. Countless postmodern authors compared, or "pasted," elements of preceding genres and styles of literature to start a unique storytelling voice, or to quip on their descendants' writing.

“Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen, she has written her way through a whole history of time with the remarkable world war two, and later she has discovered for herself one fine morning during the sunny wave in 1999” (Shepherd Press P.436).

This is one of the narrator's psychological experiments through history and culture, ending in 1999 in the modern world. Pastiche is an important postmodern element used in the Atonement (2001). McEwan stated that his early novel was a kind of imitation of a particular style, the origin of which was a slight parody" (McEwanp.128). The Atonement of the novel begins with a quote from Jane Austen's novel Northanger Monastery, which articulates the idea of pastiche rather than parody. McEwan works with Jane Austen's protagonist, Catherine Morland, to create the character Briony. The Atonement (2001) further mentions pastiche, comparing the novel to the female Quixote, a novel written by Charlotte Lennox in 1752, with the character Briony dealing with the Lennox character increase.
3. Intertextuality- The shaping of the meanings of texts by other texts is referred to as intertextuality. It can refer to an author having to borrow and transform a previous text or to a reader reflecting one text while reading another. Since poststructuralist Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" in 1966, it has been borrowed and transformed numerous times.

Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, a story about two lovers separated in World War II, was published 60 years later in 2001. The story is a postmodern novel with an unreliable narrator, Briony, the main character, so the whole novel is suspicious. The use of other texts in the Atonement not only helps predict the story, but also helps to better understand the plot and consider similarities with other literature. The play Hamlet was mentioned once at the beginning of the book when Paul Marshall stated he saw the play when he visited London. Marshall and Laura then quote the play's most notorious "to live or die" phrase. Hamlet's reference introduces the idea of identifying a parallel sequence of events between the Atonement and Hamlet. Among these similarities is the fact that the narrator of each story is unreliable and that the content of the book should not be completely trusted. In Hamlet, it is Horatio who tells the story of Hamlet and the Kingdom of Denmark after everyone's death. This is in contrast to Briony, who tells the story of the family and how her actions affected everyone after the deaths of Paul Marshall, Laura Marshall, Robbie and Cecilia. She died. Further comparisons were made among characters such as King Hamlet and Robbie, both of whom were victims of fraud by those believed to be near them.

Briony, for example, takes into account asking Cecilia to clarify the "realistic hope she was coming close to specifying, at least mentally," after seeing her sister come to the fore spurting wet from the pond outside (40). This "concept would modify itself over the years" (40), implying multiple drafts. What follows is a lengthy passage that jumps forward sixty years to inform the reader that all of Briony's fiction from that point forward was shaped by "an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself" (41) that very morning.

By emphasizing the writing process, McEwan is also emphasizing how many times Briony rewrote her novella Two Figures by a Fountain in an attempt to atone for the crime that resulted from that moment. However, it appears that Briony's original intention in writing Two Figures by a Fountain was not atonement. The original manuscript, which we never see, appears to have been a fulfilment of Briony's desire, at the age of 13, to "only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive" (40).

The novella makes it appear to be riddled with missteps, with "everything she did not wish to face" (320) left out in her attempt to "drown her guilt in a stream - three streams! - of awareness" (320). After reviewing C. C.'s rejection letter, one will notice that all of C. C.'s recommendations are noticeable when one goes back and reads Part One again: yet another smart use of metafictional methodologies on McEwan's part. Briony's concern of C.C's advice suggests that it was this rejection email that urged her to decide "to use fiction to correct the errors that fiction caused her to commit" (Finney 69).

Elements of metafiction from the novel.

A. Historiographic Metafiction

B. addressing the reader

C. a story within a story

D. a story about someone reading or writing a book.

E. a story with a narrator that exposes himself as both a character and the narrator