The Unreliable Confession

I. The Reasonable Criminal Narrator

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita gave twentieth-century fiction its most studied instance of a narrative problem: a first-person narrator, Humbert Humbert, whose command of ornate, seductive, allusive English prose is placed in the reader’s way as a kind of moral obstacle, daring her to be charmed by the sentence even as she recoils from what the sentence describes.¹ Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, introduced in The Talented Mr. Ripley, works the same problem from the opposite stylistic direction: a plain, practical, almost affectless prose that narrates murder with the same even tone Ripley might use to describe packing a suitcase, precisely because for Ripley the two tasks require comparable degrees of attention.² Between them, Nabokov and Highsmith define two poles of the same technique: the criminal narrator whose voice refuses to supply the moral alarm the reader expects, forcing the reader to generate that alarm herself, unassisted by the text.

James Mulhern’s “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina” both deploy a version of the Highsmith pole specifically — plain, procedural, unornamented diction in service of a confession the narrator never treats as remarkable. This essay argues that the specific mechanism by which both stories achieve this effect is the substitution of professional or clinical vocabulary for moral vocabulary at the exact moment violence is confessed, so that the sentence describing a poisoning reads, structurally, identically to the sentence that would describe completing a lesson plan or filing a form.

II. “Peppermint Candy”: Confession in the Language of a Safety Data Sheet

Mr. Darnell’s confession in “Peppermint Candy” is delivered entirely in the register of product information. Having decided to poison a student’s candy, he does not narrate any deliberation, guilt, or hesitation; he narrates procedure: “I took the Visine out of my drawer. I found the paper listing the poisonous effects from tetrahydrozoline, the active ingredient in the eye drops. If swallowed: difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, and coma, among other effects.”³ The sentence reads exactly like a safety data sheet because that is, functionally, what it is quoting — Mulhern has Darnell narrate his own criminal method using the same bureaucratic register the story has already established him using for incident reports and I.E.P. reviews. The confession that follows maintains the register without variation: “I thought of the care I had taken to lightly rub Visine onto the candy before rewrapping it. Then I searched through the trash barrel for Helen’s wrapper. I placed it in the zipper pocket of my satchel with the printout about the drug.”³

The rhetorical achievement here, in the Highsmith lineage, is the absence of any verb of feeling. Darnell does not report satisfaction, anxiety, or triumph; he reports actions in sequence — took, found, thought, searched, placed — the exact syntax of a procedural checklist. The story’s final line extends the pattern to its logical, chilling endpoint: “I retrieved the peppermints from my desk drawer and placed them in my satchel. I would share them again another day.”³ “I would share them again” is grammatically a statement of simple future intention, the same construction one might use to describe returning library books; the horror of the sentence is generated entirely by the reader’s own supplied context, since the narration itself supplies none. This is precisely the Nabokov-Highsmith wager: withhold the moral vocabulary, and the reader will be forced to provide it, at the cost of recognizing how far she has followed the narrator’s reasonable voice before that recognition arrives.

III. “Mia Bambina”: The Sociopath Who Names Herself

“Mia Bambina” performs a variation on the same technique with one crucial difference: where Darnell never uses the word that would indict him, Molly Bonamici names her own condition outright, and the naming becomes, paradoxically, part of the same procedural flattening. Having engineered a roommate’s death by lacing cookies with cocaine, obtained from a family associate, to trigger a genetic heart condition she has learned of in confidence, Molly narrates the method with the same checklist precision as Darnell: “I knew Ashley loved sweets during her workouts, and I had placed the cookies on top of my dresser, the direction she faced while doing her ‘fitness dancing.’ I also knew that whenever she paused or was interrupted, she ate a cookie.”⁴ The reasoning is presented as competent tactical planning, indistinguishable in its syntax from a coach describing an opponent’s habits.

Molly’s explicit self-diagnosis is where the story departs furthest from, and simultaneously most resembles, its Nabokov-Highsmith antecedents: “One of the perks of being a sociopath is that you learn how to quickly gather necessary information by manipulating people, using their weaknesses to your advantage… Ironically, Ashley and I had something in common—a genetic inheritance. I guess you could say we both had heart conditions. Of course, mine was more useful. Sociopathy wouldn’t kill me.”⁴ This passage does something neither Humbert nor Ripley’s narration typically does: it supplies the reader’s missing moral vocabulary itself, but converts that vocabulary into a wry, almost pleased piece of self-description — “a perk” — rather than a confession requiring justification. The effect is a kind of pre-emptive disarmament of the reader’s judgment: Molly has already said the word the reader was going to think, which paradoxically makes the sentence land as confidence rather than confession.

The story’s final movement completes the procedural register with grim comedy the Nabokov-Highsmith tradition rarely permits itself: Molly’s grandmother Nonna, asked to add the lethal dose to the cookie batch, agrees in the same domestic register she would use for any recipe request — “Sure mia bambina. What’s one more ingredient? Not a problem” — and Molly plans to “call to thank her, and remark on the effective wording in her note,” reframing murder as a successfully executed collaborative project between grandmother and granddaughter.⁴ The story’s closing sentence, reporting that “the chocolate chip cookies were a perfect hit,” deploys a pun (a baking success, a lethal strike) with the same deadpan flatness Highsmith reserves for Ripley’s most casual dispatches.⁴

IV. Two Confessions, One Rhetorical Machine

Placed beside each other, Darnell and Molly reveal the range available within a single technique. Darnell withholds the word for his own condition entirely, forcing the reader to supply it; Molly supplies the word herself and, in doing so, defuses its power to indict her, converting confession into a kind of professional credential. Both narrators, in the Nabokov-Highsmith lineage, treat the reader as an audience whose moral reaction is simply not their problem — the prose does its job (clear, sequential, competent) regardless of what that job happens to describe. What Mulhern adds to the tradition, distinct from both his forebears, is the institutional setting in which both confessions occur: a public-school classroom and a Boston University dormitory, sites of ordinary American adolescent and professional life rather than the exotic itinerancy of Humbert’s motels or the European high society Ripley infiltrates. The unreliable confession, in Mulhern’s hands, does not require a criminal underworld or a continental picaresque; it requires only a desk drawer, a mixing bowl, and a narrator articulate enough to describe both without once raising her own voice.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Teaching as Vocation and Trap Unreliable Child Narrators