The Penitential Imagination in Andre Dubus’s Short Fiction
By NATHAN KILPATRICK
BY CONSIDERING THE GREATER CONTEXT OF WRITER ANDRE DUBUS’S CATHOLIC IMAGINATION, LOGOS AUTHOR NATHAN KILPATRICK INTRODUCES AN ELEMENT OF DUBUS’S WORK IN LOGOS 25:2, SPRING 2022, NOT PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED BY SCHOLARS, NAMELY ITS PENITENTIAL DIMENSION.
Andre Dubus’s character Joe Ritchie in the novella “Adultery” returns to the sacrament of penance with an awareness of his sins, but Joe returns to seek an external authority that pulls him out of his moral morass and offers community that prepares him for his death. First published in 1974 in The Sewanee Review, “Adultery” is one of three novellas that make up a trilogy detailing the complications of the open marriages of Edith and Hank Allison and Jack and Terry Linhart. Joe Ritchie, Edith’s co-adulterer
and a former priest, is ultimately a minor character in the larger trilogy and within the novella “Adultery” itself, though no less significant for his minor status. As Edith thinks through what demands her broken marriage can make of her, it is her relationship with Joe that allows the reader to understand the ways in which sin isolates a person and penance reconciles him to the communities that will sustain him. The isolation caused by sin becomes apparent early in the story, when Joe thinks through his
relationship with Edith. Despite having been a priest, he tries to justify their adultery by insisting on the lack of nuance confessors might have for their situation: It was not that he believed he was sinning with her; it was that he didn’t know. And if indeed he were living in sin it was too complex for him to enter a confessional and simply murmur the word adultery; too complex for him to burden just any priest with, in any confessional. He recognized this as pride: the sinner
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