Making Us See the Ghosts

Abstract
This chapter examines the ghosts that pervade McEwan’s Atonement, both as motifs of an age-old literary tradition that have survived throughout centuries and as symptoms of a modern metafictional reflexion. And more particularly, we explore the visual, that is intermedial, embodiment of those simultaneous beings that inhabit heterogeneous times.

In Mc Ewan’s fiction, the spectral appears visually (rather than through sounds for instance). Their appearance has to do with a dialectic temporality and is captured by the writer’s expressive visual prose.