SOURCE: Oakleaf, David. “‘Not the Truth’: The Doubleness of Hogg's Confessions and the Eighteenth-Century Tradition.” Studies in Scottish Literature 18 (1983): 59-74.

In the following essay, Oakleaf analyzes the double narrative of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in terms of eighteenth-century conceptions of empirical and subjective experience and of the sublime and the beautiful.

The double perspective of Editor and Justified Sinner is the central critical problem in Hogg's Confessions [The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner]. Certainly the two versions of the story are not in complete agreement and the ambiguity is related to the ambiguous relationships between Robert and his doubles, George and Gil-Martin. These ambiguities have obvious connections to contemporary Romantic fiction and poetry, so that it is all the more suggestive that the Confessions presents a logical extreme development of the dominant philosophical tradition of the eighteenth century. The Editor's...