Character who achieves Atonement

Atonement is said to be the the process of forgiving or pardoning a transgression. I dont think any of the characters achieved atonement. I think Briony is trying to achieve it but her sister won't meet up with her. She has the most to apologize for since she is the reason Robbie and Cecilia were seperated in the first place. I know that Robbie would of probably been sent off to war anyways, but she humiliated him in front of her family. Briony is the one of the biggest reasons why Cecilia won't see her parents. In Briony's fictional story she kind of gets atonement by Robbie and Cecilia but it is fictional. The truth is no one achieves atonement in the story.

Favorite Story is Pet Milk

I enjoyed the short story, Pet Milk, by Stuart Dybek. It's about a couple in Chicago that plan on going different ways for their future plans. One plans on going to Europe for grad school and the other plans on going to the Peace Corps. I like the story the most because when I was little I didn't really like the taste of coffee. I just thought I looked older and more mature when I drank it. The narrator liked the way it looked when he put the pet milk in the coffee. The narrator says, "It's not that I enjoy the taste especially, but I like the way Pet milk swirls in the coffee. I also like the story because I could relate to the city train. I use to ride the city train, and I use to look through the glass at the people waiting at the train stops. It was an overall good short story. It wasn't too long and it was a good story.

The Vietnam Story

The Plot begins with the beginning of a war between South Vietnamese, United States, and North Vietnamese. The unnamed narrator tells about the war and his struggles in prison in Vietnam. He also tells about his Vietnamese girlfriend named Maria and how much they have fallen in love. His Vietnamese girlfriend tells him she is on his side of the war and that she is going to go back with him to the United States. What he doesn't know is that she is lying to him, and she is really just trying to figure out where all his troops are based so that she could tell her brother and have them captured. He also tells about how bad it is there with the drug problems and all the women and children who have been strapped with bombs and sacrificing themselves to kill the Americans. The heroin is also making the troops get flashbacks of the bombing of their fellow troops, which most of them lost a lot of friends. The narrator also speaks about how they don't think they should be over their helping fight this war. At the end of the story Maria turns on the narrator and he becomes a prisoner of the Vietnamese, and is tortured and punished where he is oblivious to everything because of the drugs and the flashbacks of the suiciding bombing, his girlfriend, and he doesn't understand why he is alive. He wants to just be killed.