How does McEwan present the outsider, and sympathy for them, in an extract from Part 2? (pg 308-309 ‘Luc was rambling again…he was about to die’)

In her interaction with Luc Cornet, Briony is drawn into a fiction where she is an outsider by virtue of her inability to truly know the life he describes – despite its appeal to her.
Luc treats Briony as if she knows the events he refers to, as if she is someone she knows she is not, and McEwan’s presentation of Briony’s readiness to adopt this persona shows her romantic nature. She cannot bring herself to tell Luc that she is does not know him, and her easy adoption of the character of the girl who visited the bakery – readily assuring him that his family’s croissants were ‘the best in Millau’ – makes her (in reality) an outsider experiencing the personal life of Luc and this unknown girl. That ‘no other reply [than yes] was possible’ to Luc’s question of ‘do you love me?’ holds with Briony’s tendency to become swept up in a fantasy, and become fully immersed in her character. However, while this has previously been disastrous, in this instance Briony’s actions make her likeable; her ‘lying’ to alleviate suffering. However, McEwan creates sympathy for Briony, as her immersion in the fantasy clearly affects her. Her acknowledgement that ‘He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die’ is completely in contrast with the romantic atmosphere of their earlier dialogue. The tripling of ‘things Luc was’ compounds the tragedy of Briony’s attachment to him, and brings the reader back to the ‘reality’ of the hospital. By finishing the list with the blunt fact that ‘he was about to die’, McEwan creates sympathy for Briony’s plight of becoming attached to the doomed.
Luc is also, more obviously than Briony, an outsider in this extract. While Briony’s position of ‘outsider’ is more in the metaphysical sense, Luc’s position of ‘outsider’ is more literal. He is a foreigner, ‘away from his family’ and he is totally away from anyone he knows and loves. He is also detached from his reality, with his ‘rambling’ and ‘gazing with rapture’, these images suggesting that he is in a trance and not fully lucid. Sympathy is created for Luc, as he does not know he is alone, and his status as an outsider from reality means that the reader is aware that his hopes such as to ‘be married in summer’ are totally pointless, and that he cannot know this.
In this extract, both Briony and Luc briefly escape from the realities of the war. They are both outsiders in the ward, in a world of their own, and McEwan creates sympathy for them by showing the reader the life that could have been, in contrast with the life that is.