23 pages • 46 minutes read
First Confession
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Literary Devices
Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony refers to the tension in a story created when the reader/audience knows some critical information that a character lacks. For instance, a wife acts strangely at the dinner table. Her husband is happily unaware of the change in her behavior, but the audience knows she has just come from an afternoon liaison with her lover. Dramatic irony refers to that disparity. We know something the character does not.
Dramatic irony is difficult to employ in a short story because of the limited scope of the narrative. Here, dramatic irony is achieved through the interaction of Jackie and the reader. O’Connor relies on the reader to be familiar with the protocols of confession and its place in the Catholic sensibility. Much as with another towering mid-20th-century Catholic writer of short stories, American Flannery O’Connor (1924-1965), irony depends on the reader’s participation. We know what Jackie does not: that sin is measured by deliberate intent and intentional malice; that he is being manipulated by nominal Christians to feel undeserved guilt; that the priest (and by extension God) is not an antagonist waiting to humiliate and spiritually eviscerate sinners; that family can be infuriating; and finally that dark thoughts are part of being human.
Jackie never understands any of this. But heading home, his heart alight with happiness, and sucking contentedly on the candy given him by a priest that has surprised him with his genial good nature and thoughtful approach to sin, Jackie edges closer to that insight.
Narrator/Point of View
O’Connor hands over the narrative to a single character. While any character might have worked, selecting the one who understands the least about the theology of salvation, damnation, absolution, and the soul shows that the naïve and innocent may best understand the value and reward of confession. The voice that tells the story is accessible and honest. The vocabulary and sentence structure suggest that an older Jackie may be looking back on this experience with a kind of bemusement. But the story stays limited to what Jackie thinks and observes as he goes to his first confession. We learn as Jackie learns. We go into the confessional box with the same misgivings, and we share the joyous discovery of the sensitive and sensible priest.
The action is unquestionably realistic. Jackie shares his ordinary experiences. But like the testimony of a person peering through a single window, the story is at once factually accurate and psychologically limited. By using the perception of a seven-year-old Jackie, the story not only examines the moral and spiritual worth of the Catholic sacrament of confession but also reveals character. The story is less about confession and more about Jackie’s coming of age and his realization, although he does not fully apprehend its implications, that human beings are not perfect, that sin is inevitable, and it is normal to have dark feelings about people who disappoint you.
Humor
There is nothing particularly comic about the sacrament of confession. It is a solemn ritual of soul searching. In confronting the failings of the soul with intellectual and emotional honesty, a Catholic undergoes a painful self-examination that includes sharing those intimacies aloud to a priest. Unexpectedly, the story introduces rich and genial humor into the sober ritual. There is Jackie’s wildly exaggerated sense of his sinfulness, the catechism teacher’s attempt to manipulate her class by offering to pay them to hold a finger over a lighted candle, the scene when Jackie grabs a bread knife in a desperate effort not to eat fish stew, the excruciatingly long walk to the chapel for his confession (his last glimpse of the trees and the nearby River Cork feel like “Adam’s last glimpse of Paradise” [Paragraph 13]), and Jackie’s slapstick efforts to kneel on the tiny shelf in the dark confessional box.
The humor often arises from Jackie’s belief that the stories of hell are literal truths. Thus, after listening to Mrs. Ryan’s story about the fellow who made an imperfect confession and was dragged down into hell, leaving behind only scorched handprints on his furniture, Jackie is relieved when after opening up to the priest about the depths of his villainy he does not smell burning wood. Such touches of humor and wistful comedy upend assumptions the reader would likely make based on the story’s title. O’Connor attempts to introduce the genial whimsy that he believed was critical in understanding the Irish character.
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By Frank O'Connor
