SOURCE: Harries, Elizabeth W. “Duplication and Duplicity: James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Wordsworth Circle 10, no. 2 (spring 1979): 187-96.

In the following essay, Harries examines the inherent ambiguity of Hogg's double narrative in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

As I wrote, my imagination warmed to the task; everything took on the shape of a rounded work of art; and the tissue of lies, with which I hoped to veil the truth from the judge, became more and more closely-woven.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

One of the strengths of Romantic fiction is one of its apparent weaknesses, its failure to create rounded forms, complete and self-contained like Archibald MacLeish's mute globed fruits. This fiction is not mute but talkative, openly mulling over choices, presenting experience not as experienced but as told. We are not permitted to live in the world of a...