46 pages • 1 hour read
James HoggThe Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1824A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Robert Wringhim Colwan
Robert, the book’s anti-hero, is a man of two halves. His full name hints at the complexities of his identity. He is the second son of Laird George Colwan, but is named for his mother’s priest. While his older brother inherited his father’s names and affections, Robert was cast aside. To his father, he represents the utter failure of the marriage between Laird Colwan and Rabina. The editor suggests that Robert is almost certainly Laird Colwan’s son, but Laird Colwan cannot separate his loathing for his wife and her favored preacher, Robert Wringhim, from any affection he might have for his second son. He refuses to acknowledge Robert, so Wringhim enters the youngster’s life as a makeshift father figure. Robert is baptized with Wringhim’s name, leaving him with a full name that reflects the discord in his family. He is both Wringhim and Colwan, raised by the former after being disowned by the latter. Robert, raised in this atmosphere and resentment, directs his hatred toward his father and older brother.
Wringhim raises Robert in his own spiritual image. Like Wringhim, Robert is told that he is a justified man. He is raised as a staunch Calvinist and a believer in Predestination, meaning that his entry to heaven is already assured. For the youngster who has been cast aside by his biological father, this presumption of love and affection from the divine is inherently appealing. This religious conviction also hardens Robert’s loathing for his brother, as he criticizes George’s sinful behavior and compares it with his own justified existence. This attitude of resentment and loathing makes Robert an easy target for Gil-Martin. The seemingly demonic Gil-Martin appears to Robert as a learned man, resembling the main authority figure in Robert’s life, Wringhim. Like Wringhim, Gil-Martin has profound opinions about religion that captivate Robert. Like Wringhim, he advocates for the idea of Predestination, only to take these ideas to a more tragic, bloodier conclusion. According to Gil-Martin, Robert should murder sinners to either send them to hell or to accelerate their entry to heaven. Since he is predestined to go to heaven, Gil-Martin argues, Robert is immune from sin. Robert accepts this reasoning, mainly as it grants him a vent for his lifelong resentment and aggression. He does not need much encouragement to kill George, in spite of what he might write in his confession. Robert is captured by Predestination, but an emotional—rather than a religious—predestination. Robert was always going to murder George; Gil-Martin simply gives him an excuse to do so.
Sin has a destructive effect on Robert. He feels as though his self is splitting in two, as he suffers from long periods of unknowingness. The disassociation that Robert experiences is driven by the sheer effort of trying to maintain his logical justification for his crimes. He strives to justify murder to himself, and Gil-Martin helps him, but even a zealot like Robert cannot maintain this justification forever. His sense of self begins to disintegrate, collapsing under the logical fallacies that are piling up in his subconscious. The flaws in his reasoning are exposed, and Robert’s self-identity dissolves into fear, paranoia, and desperation. Through him, the author suggests that an excess of self-validation can result in hypocrisy, hubris and ruin, and also posits that it is impossible to sin without consequence.
Gil-Martin
Of all the characters in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, antagonist Gil-Martin is the most mysterious. His name, which the author mentions is not Christian, is similar to a Gaelic word meaning “fox,” an animal commonly associated with guile and trickery in literature. Where the book’s other characters are clear products of their environment, Gil-Martin’s background is unexplained, and he remains nebulous and strange. Other disputes are historical or religious in nature, while Gil-Martin exists at the epicenter of the novel’s tenuous, dubious portrayal of the supernatural. He can change his appearance, presenting himself as other characters. While adopting these characters’ likenesses, Gil-Martin is able to understand their thoughts and feelings. Ironically, this power presents as a form of supernatural empathy. In a chaotic, combative world, in which families are torn apart by religious and political disagreements, the demonic Gil-Martin is the only character who is seemingly able to empathize with other people. However, instead of using this supernatural ability of understanding for good or bringing people together, he uses it for evil and corruption. This solidifies him as a malign character.
Gil-Martin’s goal is to corrupt Robert. The young Robert considers himself to be one of God’s elect, destined to enter heaven. As a result, he reasons, nothing he does can be a sin. Gil-Martin enters Robert’s life and tests this reasoning to a tragic extreme. Robert is convinced by Gil-Martin to murder a number of people, including his brother. In truth, Gil-Martin does not elicit from Robert any sentiment that does not already exist within him. Robert allows himself to be convinced when Gil-Martin invites him to sin. In this fashion, Gil-Martin’s character exists as a formative critique of religious predestination. Gil-Martin corrupts Robert as a form of social satire, leading the young zealot to the logical end point of his own religion.
After Robert loses long stretches of time to blackouts, he comes to suspect that Gil-Martin is adopting his appearance to commit sins in his name. Robert loses trust in Gil-Martin and flees, though Gil-Martin tracks him across the country. By this time, Robert suspects that Gil-Martin is the devil, or at the very least a demon. Gil-Martin seems able to fight off the supposed monsters that plague Robert in the night, but he can do nothing to assuage the guilt and remorse that Robert now feels, nor would he necessarily want to. With Robert corrupted, Gil-Martin has a final objective: compel Robert to agree to a suicide pact. Robert eventually dies by suicide, but Gil-Martin simply vanishes. In Robert’s death, Gil-Martin is as ephemeral and as non-committal as ever, leaving Robert to deal with the tragic consequences of his own actions. Gil-Martin is a vehicle through which the author shows that belief in one’s superiority and infallibility is inherently corruptive.
George Colwan
If Robert is a man divided between two identities, George is representative of his brother’s better self, the answer to the question of what might have happened to Robert if his father had loved him. George is confident, charming, charismatic, and well-adjusted. Notably, his life is almost entirely free of religion, while Robert’s existence is almost entirely consumed by thoughts of spirituality and morality. In this way, he is an advertisement for a secular life. While Robert sits at home, his mind festering with resentment and bitterness, George is barely even aware of his brother’s existence. The first time he gives any serious thought to his brother is when Robert pesters him at a game of tennis. This meeting is instructive of the relationship: Robert obsesses over George, who barely acknowledges Robert until he becomes so frustrated that he lashes out and then immediately apologizes, only to have his apology refused by his resentful brother. The continued harassment of George by Robert is portrayed from different perspectives. The editor, via Arabella, describes Robert’s hounding of George as crazed and violent, while Robert’s own confession frames the stalking of George as an almost moral act. Again, George is illustrative of Robert’s separation from society. By existing, he shows the world what Robert might have been. Through his persecution, George reveals to the audience the ways in which Robert’s self-righteousness manifests as disillusioned violence.
While Robert becomes increasingly obsessed over George, the brothers’ different personalities are evident in the way in which George constantly attempts to repair their relationship. He pities his brother, even if he does not like Robert. They fight on several occasions, though George is always ready to apologize to Robert. This offer of apology is repeatedly rejected. Furthermore, George’s willingness to apologize to Drummond is what leads him into the duel that seals his fate. Robert and Gil-Martin take advantage of George’s earnestness and his willingness to apologize, luring him into the duel under false pretenses. George assumes that he is resolving an issue with Drummond, only to be attacked by a devil in disguise and then stabbed in the back by his resentful brother. George’s death is illustrative of the differences between the two brothers, exposing their flaws. Robert, the paranoid and bitter embodiment of resentment, betrays his brother while George, drunk on the sins of socializing and keen to apologize to his friend, is killed by his own naivety.
The Editor
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is narrated by an unnamed editor. The editor plays an important role, establishing an air of historical verisimilitude around the supposedly found documents. According to the editor’s version of events, the middle passage of the novel is a confession, written by Robert, while the rest of the narrative has been reconstructed retrospectively by the editor. This gives the novel the effect of an investigation, in which the editor searches through the historical records and turns up anything that might support or contradict the story. Key to this is the way in which the editor criticizes certain holes in the story, pointing out things that could not possibly be true. Added to this, the editor is willing to admit to the limits of the powers of the investigation. The final passages of the book involve the editor refusing to commit to whether or not the story is true. Given the editor’s previous predilection for truth and honesty, that even the editor should be swayed by the strange story adds credence to the suggestion that the events of the novel actually took place.
An important part of the editor’s detached, seemingly objective narration is the historical distance between the editor’s narrative and the events described in Robert’s confession. More than a hundred years have passed since Robert murdered George, meaning that plenty of details have been lost in the intermittent period. The religious fervor that sparked the disagreement between the brothers is documented history, but history that is very much in the past. The editor, no longer beholden to local disagreements between the Episcopalian and Jacobite orders, can discuss these matters with some amount of objective distance, critiquing ideas such as Predestination by presenting the inherent absurdities of such a belief without fear of offending anyone. The function of the editor, then, is to construct an alternative version of the past, presenting fiction as though it were fact through the objective mode of narration that resembles a historical investigation into a piece of local folklore more than a novel.
