As its title suggests, Pleading Guilty should be read as an example of confessional literature. The novel opens with an epigraph from The Confessions of St. Augustine (397-401). In its desire to a frank and open record of Mack Malloy's life, it is also reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781, 1788). The novel also echoes a whole line of confessional poets including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and W. D. Snodgrass who all exposed their personal guilts and shortcomings in their works.