In McEwan's Atonement there were a ton of secrets. The secret's that Briony first start to see, with Cecillia and Robbie, first near the fountain, then in the library, are really what starts everything. Briony, instead of asking questions, or trying to get to the bottom of things, she makes her own assumptions about what seems to be happening, and clearly they are wrong. But the whole point to Briony was that she wanted to have secrets to keep and hold on to. Briony is a lonely child, she's the baby. The youngest of families usually get all the attention, they want it, they need it. And with Briony, it's like she's a generation behind everything. She's not just the youngest there is quite a large age gap between her and Cecilia and an even larger gap between her and Leon. So she's kind of the odd man out. Her dads always out of town and working, and her mom gets migraines quite often. And she was this huge house that she lives in and there seems to be no one around to give her that attention. I think that Briony, having secrets is like having someone give her attention, it's similar to that feeling. Not only that, she can make the secret worse and more ellaborate than it actually is. With her mind, she can create and make what ever she wants of it. And that's where she went wrong. I relaly think Briony knew that what was happening between Cecilia and Robbie was innocent and nothing to bring attention too. But i think that was boring to her, it wasn't the secret she wanted it to be, so she elaborated, and look what happened.
All in all this whole book seems to be packed full of secrets.
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I can agree with this; there certainly are a large number of secrets kept from Briony. I don't think it would have helped very much, though, if Cecillia had the chance to explain to her what was going on, because she was a thirteen year old girl and had already proven herself to be quite creative. We learn this because she has written an entire play, a feat not many thirteen year olds have accomplished. I feel it is her inward bound nature that keeps her from seeing things the way they really are, the way she makes everything story-esque. For example, in the last few pages, she finally admits that most of the story as she told it was a fabrication and that Cecillia and Robbie had actually died in "real life." The collective whole of the secrets kept from Briony in some ways build to her ultimate sort of "secrecy" about how the actual events took place.
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