In his critique of McEwan's Atonement, Nicholas Lezard states that, "...the novel itself is the act of atonement that Briony Tallis must perform; yet we are in the land of unreliable narrators, where evasion and lies obscure and undermine the story being told." To atone is to seek forgiveness for one's sins. The novel is Briony's attempt to be forgiven for the crime she committed when she was a naive 13-year-old girl, during the heat wave of the summer of 1935. The narrator tells the story from several points of view; bases other characters' thoughts and reactions on your knowledge of them. In telling the story the narrator has a tendency to lie, or rather avoid the truth, to improve his novel. After Briony admits that her atonement was not entirely truthful, the reader may question the narrator's reliability. Briony's novel shows the story from different perspectives and when she acts as an omniscient narrator from any perspective other than her own she is unreliable. Briony is simply telling the story from an alternate point of view with no evidence of personal interpretations of specific characters, but simply her observations of their personalities, the other characters only exist through her creations. "When I'm dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will exist only thanks to my inventions." (McEwan, p. 350) This is at the very end of the novel, as Briony writes in 1999, on her 77th birthday. This is a clear representation that in her opinion it doesn't matter how reliable a narrator is because all the characters will be nothing more than novelties, inventions, at the time of publication. Even when Briony narrates from her point of view, she states at the beginning of the novel: "She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing, and she gave her narrative a self-deprecating or mock-heroic tone." tone." (McEwan, p. 38) Briony is speaking in the third person about the atonement she was supposed to complete 6 decades after the crime took place. She states that she is clearly aware of the extent to which she will deceive the reader. The phrase "self -mythologization" refers to the way in which she turns her character into a myth, filling him with dishonesty. Briony's novel is entirely autobiographical, the six decades that pass between her first draft and the final one have altered her character.