Do you agree with Briony’s self-assessment – that it was “an act of kindness” and not of cowardice to allow Robbie and Cecilia to live in a fictional version of events? What contradictions and conditional statements fill the last three paragraphs of the novel? Why does this matter? Please use quotations from the novel!

Briony's guilt is so deep that she is apparently desperate to try and alleviate it by any means possible, including fictionalizing the fates of the two people whose lives she ruined with her dishonesty and petty, childish jealousy. That she describes this fiction, in which Robbie and Cecilia both survive the war and are able to be together again as an act of kindness is very telling: she is in fact revealing that she wishes she had been more kind herself, many years ago, when she lashed out in anger and cruelty, setting things in motion that sent Robbie to prison and finally to his death in war.
Her character says this choice, to have Robbie and Cecilia be together at the end, is "a stand against oblivion and despair," but it's not quiet clear if she means this in a general sense, to celebrate the love that existed between Robbie and Cecilia simply because it makes for a more optimistic story, or because Briony's own advanced age and failing health have filled her with feelings of oblivion and despair and a need to set things right after all these years. She says she likes to think "this is not weakness or evasion," but in fact it is evasive to avoid confronting the hard truth of the result of her actions by essentially trying to undo them, and it shows a weakness of character to not be able to fully accept the consequences of her choices.