Study Guide to Frank O'Connor's First Confession

Study Guide
to
Frank O'Connor's "First Confession"

Preliminary Note: why this Study Guide.

This Study Guide is designed to remind you of a battery of questions that you will want to make an into an integral part of what we might call your "standard curiosity" about any story you read from now on.

For any story, the answers you get to these questions will not be important in their own right. Rather they will suggest further questions that should pay off down the line.

In this Study Guide, we'll devote each of our three readings to a particular set of interrelated questions. But in reality, these are questions that you will want to be bringing to bear "all at once and repeatedly" in the reading of any story. This is just a way of saying that they are continually relevant, and that we never answer them once and for all but keep coming back to them and pressing them further as we reflect on the story, throughout our initial reading(s) and in our later reflections on the story (even when we are not physically consulting the text, but just mulling the story over in our minds).

You will initially have to work hard to remind yourself to be asking these questions. That is, it won't be enough to do this once, with this Study Guide in hand, on this particular story. It will take effort to make yourself keep these curiosities in mind in the case of every story from now on.

- To start with, you'll need to review this guide before undertaking the study guide of subsequent stories.
- And you'll need to make a habit of asking yourself at the end of your first reading of any given story (whether or not you are explicitly prompted to do so in that particular study guide) whether in fact you have remembered to bring these questions to bear.

Your first reading: the narrative "window" or "angle of vision" upon the action.

(1) For any story, we want to reflect on the implications of who is telling the story. But before we can do this, we have to get clear about the nature of the narrator. Here are just some of the possibilities we might be confronted with.

an outsider to the action.
- Is this a consciousness that seems in possession of full knowledge of the situation, and able, ultimately, to clarify anything that we might be interested in?
  - For us to be stay interested in the tale beyond the telling of it, there must be something that we are moved to be interested in that such a narrator nevertheless refuses to disclose to us at least in a direct way. What is this, and why does the author indirectly emphasize it by arranging for the narrator to withhold it?
  Does the narrator's being "outside" the action contribute to his or her impartiality? Or does it pose a problem for the narrator, who has to work at understanding what he or she reports?
  - If the latter: what are the limitations the narrator is working under? And why might the author have decided to put our access to the action under such limitations?
a participant?
- Does the narrator's closesness to the events enhance his familiarity with its ultimate significance? Or does it actually hamper the narrator's ability to do justice to the meaning of what happens?
  - That is: Is the author inviting us to play a game of evaluating a witness's reliability?
    - This question is especially on the table when the narrator is identical with the protagonist of the story. Note that here, "degree of" identity can be an issue: how much "distance" does the first-person narrator have upon the events he or she tells us about?
      - Often, deciding this will require us to pay careful attention to the tone of the narrator's narration.

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your first reading.

Your second reading: the shape of the action.

Use your second reading of the story to force yourself to concentrate on the following questions that have to do with how story has been structured..

(2) How does the story piece out in terms of plot?

(a) What are the important conflicts in the story?

Sorts, types to be on the lookout for:

Between characters?

Within characters?

Between "points of view" -- between sets of assumptions about how things are? about how things ought to be?

Between characters and elements that do not have the nature of "character" (e.g., impersonal forces of nature, social predicament, cultural situation)?

Relationships: Do some of the conflicts featured in the story underlie or give rise to others?

Priority and focus: Is some one conflict more central to the story than others?

(b) What serves as the precipitating incident of the action? That is: what episode or event precipitates the plot, upsetting the pre-existing (relatively stable) state of affairs, and initiating the complication?

What is the status quo ante (the "state of affairs beforehand") that is upset by the precipitating incident?

How does the story contrive to get this information before the reader?

(c) What episode or moment is best thought of as constituting the climax of the story?

In what sense or senses does it resolve the central conflict?

What light does it throw on different subordinate conflicts?

(d) How is the complication constructed? That is: what is the causal process by which the story proceeds from precipitating incident to climax?

(e) Is there a dénouement to the story's plot? That is: what, if anything, follows the story's climax, relaxing the tension released at the climax?

Why is it there -- what does it do? What would be surrendered if the story were to conclude simply with the climactic episode?

Does it, for example, indicate some implications that might otherwise go unappreciated?

(f) What are the specific features of the story's conclusion?

What particular kind of "equilibrium" situation are we left with?

What do you see as the possible point of this? Is the author, for example, being ironic? Is it "superior" or "inferior" to the condition of equilibrium that preceded the precipitating incident? (Be alert to possible complexity: coulds it be superior in some but inferior in others?)

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your second reading.

And before proceeding to your third reading, take the time to collect your thoughts in connection with the above questions by jotting downs some notes.

Your third reading: the contexts of the action.

For this reading, see if you can make yourself reflectively aware of the following issues:

(3) What is the setting of the story? Where does the action take place?

Note that generally we are not interested in "time and place" for their own sake, but for what they in turn lead us to notice about the cultural context of the action: what assumptions are the characters acting under? (We can't understand their motives -- to say nothing of evaluate them! -- if we don't grasp these assumptions, and the reasons for them.) To appreciate what is going on in any historical situation -- real or imagined -- that isn't pretty much already our own, we have to be something of an anthropologist.

For instance, in the case of O'Connor's story, we have to understand something of the traditional Catholic conceptions of sin and redemption, and of the practices by which it inducts members into an understanding of these in turn. Either we must call upon our prior understanding of these, or we must somehow construct an understanding of these on the basis of details available in the story itself (and perhaps eventually by questioning our Catholic friends).
- What is the essential character of sin per se -- that is, what constitutes sinfulness as such, as distinct from the specific character of this or that particular sin?
- What is the sacrament of penance? Specifically: what is the role in it of its specific elements: confession, contrition, satisfaction (or penitance) and absolution? (How would a well-informed Catholic reader recognize the presence of each of these phases in O'Connor's story?).
Also in this story we have to take into account the contrasts
- between the world the narrator's grandmother has grown up in and the world into which she comes when she is taken into her son's household, and
- between the mental universe of the narrator's sister (her sort of Catholicism) and the mental universe of the priest the narrator encounters in the course of his first confession (his sort of Catholicism).
What are the leading presuppositions you can detect for each of these points of view?

When you have finished your third reading, go to the Writing Assignment on this story.

Suggestions are welcome. Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

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This page last updated 26 October 2000.