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Confessional literature is a kind of autobiographical writing in which one tries to tell the truth of oneself, about oneself, as honestly and completely as one can. We should think that confession, above all other modes of literary representation, would come closest to reporting the truth, for it is based on several things which tend to guarantee the truth from human beings: a desire to unburden oneself of pain and shame; the confessor's fear of the consequences of mendacity; and it is spoken to a God whom the confessor desires to know and serve and elicit the forgiveness of — in other words, the confessor has the listener he wants, a listener who is both all-powerful and prepared to forgive.
Confession, we might say, meets the conditions for truth. It posits individual man as the hero of his own life, able to know the contents of his own heart and the nature of his own desires, but it does so within the context of an inviolable religious principle, which is that the smallest individual unit is not one person, but two people — God and yourself, or if you don't believe in God, whichever Sovereign Judge your confession is addressed to. For this reason, the confession has produced some of the most important works of Western Literature: St. Augustine's Confessions, of course, but also the modern confessions of Wordsworth's The Prelude and Rousseau's The Confessions, which are notable for having been among the first works of literature to “lay stress on the significance of childhood experience” (Rousseau, , “Intro,” p. ix) in forming the adult personality.
So, from the outside looking in, confession — which might also go under the name of “autobiography” — appears to be as devoted to the truth as writing can be. In fact, “Autobiography is usually thought of not as a kind of fiction-writing but as a kind of history-writing, with the same allegiance to the truth as history has” (Coetzee, 1984). The reader is, of course, familiar with the limitations of self-knowledge and sel