Comparing First Confession And Two Kinds

As growing adolescents, there are things that we do not understand because of our maturity level. Frank O’Connor and Amy Tan utterly display this in their stories, “First Confession” and “Two Kinds.” To fully understand the things we go through we have to grow and learn from our experiences or learn from our peers. In the story, “First Confession,” Jackie is a young boy who has thoughts of killing his grandmother and actually tries to kill his sister with a butter knife. Being a part of the Catholic religion it is expected of children his age to participate in their first confessional. Refusing to participate, his parents make him go by having his sister, Nora, drag him there. Jackie only knew about the bad part of religion, Hell. This was because of his teacher Mrs. Ryan.
“Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger-only one finger! – in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all

He, just like any other troubled child, just did not know how to give a proper confession. In Lissa Weinstein’s article, “Coherence, Competence, and Confusion in Narratives of Middle Childhood,” she states that throughout his nervousness Jackie was able to give his first confession because the understanding priest both accepted and normalized the fact that Jackie wanted to kill his own grandmother. The priest even uses himself as an example to show Jackie that negative thoughts can even be thought in the minds of priests. The priest says,” You must have great courage. Between ourselves, there’s a lot of people I’d like to do the same to but I’d never have the nerve. Hanging is an awful death” (O’Connor 319). With this piece of information Jackie realizes that the things that he thinks are somewhat normal and that from then on confessing is not as bad as it