“Boys will be boys” - we have all heard it before. This is a terrible message to send to boys, especially the younger ones because this is what turns boys into misbehaved men. In the short story “The Confession” written by the French Moroccan journalist and author Leila Slimani in 2019, you follow the narrator’s point of view while he violates a girl, because of the peer pressure, from other boys, and how this incident follows him for the rest of his life. In the following, I would like to analyze how the narrator develops and how the men in the story interact. Furthermore, the main themes of the story are trauma, guilt and confessions.
The Confession is a story about a 16-year-old boy, whose father sends him to a village during his summer break, to learn about the life of the countryside. While he is at the village, he has a hard time making friends, but as the days go by, he meets Achour, who is an older man that knows his father. Achour makes the young boy, assault a girl sexually. The girl is notorious in the town, and gossip runs quickly in the village. He has now grown up, but this event is still haunting him in his nightmares.
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