23 pages • 46 minutes read
First Confession
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Character Analysis
Jackie
Jackie is seven years old, a first-person narrator essentially without a filter. He has a child’s perception of his world: what he likes and does not like define his worldview, at least until his first confession when he learns the world is a far subtler place.
He does not like his grandmother, who has intruded in their home with her unsophisticated country ways. He sees his family as two teams, the ones who tolerate Gran (his father and his sister) and those who do not (he and his mother). He does not respond to nuance—hence his catechism teacher’s vision of hell as a place for bad people seems sensible to him. He understands the Catholic cosmos comprising angels and devils, heaven and hell. As he approaches the confessional, he is sure that he is a thorough sinner, the priest is his avowed enemy, and hell will be the inevitable punishment.
The priest upends Jackie’s simplistic worldview and introduces him to contradictions, surprises, and irony, none of which had been part of his education so far. The priest surprises Jackie by telling him that thinking about killing people is fairly common, although acting on that impulse is both rare and bad. The priest gives Jackie a feeling of being respected rather than merely tolerated. It is left open whether Jackie, his worldview entirely upended, sees the irony in his sister’s closing statement that she might as well be a sinner, but he is now equipped to understand the world in a more nuanced way. He has left behind his childhood.
Nora
Nora plays against the stereotype of an older sister as a guardian, careful to protect a vulnerable and naive younger sibling. She exploits her brother’s darkest fears even as she happily flatters adults. It is one of Jackie’s challenges to come to terms with a sister who pretends to be something she is not, who shamelessly curries favor, and who manipulates him when he is most afraid. Most grievously, she believes she is fooling God as well, as her performance at her confession reveals.
Her hypocrisy is obvious to the reader, who may dismiss Nora as a comically harmless annoyance rather than a villain. But Jackie does not have the maturity or insight to evaluate his sister for what she is. To him, she is a looming threat, hence the logic behind swinging the bread knife. When the priest reveals to Jackie the possibility of a world without convenient absolutes, a world where people’s motivations are complicated and where it is inevitable that some people are mean or uncouth, Nora’s intimidating presence shrinks. As the story ends, Nora is revealed to be a pretentious, self-serving hypocrite, hardly a threat to Jackie any longer.
The Young Priest
Like Nora, the priest defies stereotypes. In the Irish literature of the mid-20th century, especially in the stories of the influential author James Joyce (1882-1941), writers often portrayed priests (and nuns, for that matter) as the darkest manifestations of hypocrisy, dispensers of harsh and unforgiving judgment on everyone but themselves, always invoking the threat of hell to ensure their power over others. They emerge as the embodiment of what had gone wrong with Catholicism, the modern Church’s lack of the virtues preached by Christ— compassion, humanity, patience, and understanding.
That is the priest Jackie expects to meet in the darkness of the confessional. What he finds, however, is a smiling and patient priest sympathetic toward the boy’s immaturity and lack of experience. He helps Jackie learn to use the confessional, and he stops Nora from further embarrassing Jackie. He does not threaten Jackie with hell (unlike the catechism teacher who only talks about eternal punishment to her terrified young students) even when Jackie reveals how much he dislikes his family. The priest is honest—if Jackie ever kills someone, the legal punishments would be severe. But he dispenses a calming kind of humanistic penance in proportion to what Jackie has done. When the priest walks Jackie home, Jackie sees him not as some archenemy but as a person, even better a friend. The gift of the candy reveals the priest to be understanding and kind. The priest does more for Jackie’s soul (and the boy’s evolution into mature Catholicism) than all the threats of punishment and lurid visions of hell.
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