Social expectations and individual anxieties concerning sex and sexual stereotypes in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach
I. Introduction Unlike Atonement , where at the very beginning the reader encounters an epigraph from Jane Austin that more or less pre-supposes intertextual clues for further reading, On Chesil Beach does not offer such accommodating leading first steps into its highly condensed narrative. Preoccupied with a single event that provides multivalent analyzing points, the dramatic intensity of the whole book is encoded in that condensed way of telling.
