First Confession

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