Just because he may view life from a materialistic point of view from his conscious frame of mind it appears to be very different in uncontrolled, instinct reaction.
We can suggest that this is how he views the nature of life and perhaps morality from the second piece of evidence in the chapter. He tells us that he is "lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard's perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table". A bird of prey is used for many reasons; firstly and most simply because of their characteristic staring eyes that give a cold, analytical feeling to them. As animals rather than humans they are also presumed to be free of the emotional complexities of human conscience and emotion. This, along with the aerial vantage point that is obtained by using a bird, allows Ian McEwan, through the narrator, to show the reader an emotion-free, clinical view of the event as a reflection of life as a whole. By using the simile of life to a snooker table he is exploring the idea of materialism; that concepts such as emotion, religion and the supernatural all have a scientific, atomic explanation. It suggests to the reader an image of the people involved as snooker balls all moving across the field, or baize, towards a collision, a collision of causes, human lives, human bodies, and of course a balloon. This materialistic theory is again outlined slightly later on when he describes the balloon, "filled with helium that elemental gas first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including ourselves and all our thoughts". This perspective on life can be used as a case for the existence of fate. Not a route determined by a more powerful being, that would be destiny, but fate as a simple mathematical thesis that all our lives are always going to happen in the way they do due to the arrangement of atoms in the universe.
