Briony's novelistic imagining is provoked by her efforts at empathy: "Was everyone really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was?" (34). She imagines her sister's experience, sensitively, sympathetically, and mistakenly. She then forgets to test her story against actuality, forcing all outward evidence to confirm her preconceptions.

As a result, she causes terrible suffering. She spends her life trying to make amends, but the storyteller, Briony learns, is like a God: having created a world only she controls, there is no-one to forgive her. As an exploration of the relationship between narrative and reality, this novel would be an invaluable text for the study of narrative ethics--and of the ethics of narrative.