In his 1985 essay, "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky," Coetzee challenges the integrity of Pozdnyshev's confession in The Kreutzer Sonata, a novel about which Tolstoy received so many reader inquiries regarding "what he meant" that he felt the need to provide an afterword in a later edition (197). In the afterword, he unequivocally aligns himself with Pozdnyshev and proposes that the confession which unfolds in the novel, the "truths" to which Pozdnyshev supposes he is privy, are the same truths proposed by Tolstoy. Coetzee identifies two "silences" of The Kreutzer Sonata that ultimately amount to failures of the text as an effective use of the confessional mode. "The first," he writes, "is the silence about the conversion experience, an experience in which, as the example of Tolstoy's own Confession shows, the inner experience of being a truth-bearer is felt most intensely by contrast with the previous self-deceived mode of existence. Silence about this experience thus entails a failure of dramatization" (204).
The "conversion experience" to which Coetzee refers concerns Tolstoy's character Pozdnyshev's self-proclaimed rehabilitation, from being a wicked man (who murdered his wife out of jealousy) to a now-reformed man. Coetzee proposes that the reasons Pozdnyshev gives for why and how he is reformed are deeply flawed, to say the least. There is little to no reflection by Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata to appropriately complicate the narrative, or to suggest that Pozdnyshev simply shuttles from one deeply flawed worldview to another equally flawed one. And for Tolstoy to come out and explicitly affirm the character's confession (which comprises the majority of the narrative, yet is not, technically, the perspective of the narrator) eliminates any possible double-reading or interpretation for guile on the part of Tolstoy. Coetzee continues:
The second and more serious silence is that of the narrator. Since Pozdnyshev's confession is a narrative monologue characterized by newfound self-certainty, the function of doubling back and scrutinizing the truthfulness of the truth enunciated by Pozdnyshev must, faute de mieux, fall to his auditor. His auditor performs no such function, there-by implicitly giving his support to the notion of truth that Tolstoy himself presents in the "Afterword": that truth is what it is, that there are more important things to do than scrutinize the machinations of the will at work in the utterer of truth. (204)
In reading Coetzee's criticisms of the "narrative monologue" presented by Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata, the theoretical framework behind Coetzee's crafting of Curren emerges. Mrs. Curren, narrator of Age of Iron, is constantly retracing and contradicting herself. Rather than simply charting the "conversion" of its narrator, Age of Iron is the trial and error of Curren's attempts to convert. Curren's goal is absolution; of course, she never attains the absolution she's looking for.
In "Confession and Double Thoughts," Coetzee explores the efficacy of secular confessions in literature. Without any deity to absolve the confessor, how can there be absolution? This is a question explored in Age of Iron. Curren's background as a retired classics professor allows her to engage with deities and conceptions of the afterlife across many cultures; however, Curren's academic understanding of religions creates a distance between herself and any real hope of divine absolution. The novel is also epistolary; all of its contents are written by Curren to her daughter, positioning Curren's daughter as the secular witness and judge of Curren's confession. Coetzee further complicates the confessional dynamic by introducing conflict; Curren's daughter is, herself, complicit in the very same apartheid structure that leaves Curren with a guilty conscience.
Even after all of Curren's intellectual gymnastics and self-reflection, she never reaches the end of her confession. She never attains absolution, which, in any case, from Curren's perspective, seems like only something one can attain after death. If all of this uncertainty weren't enough to convince his reader that he, Coetzee, does not espouse Curren's views (as Tolstoy affirms with regard to himself and Pozdnyshev), Coetzee later commented negatively on the possibility of Curren's absolution, referring to her as one of "those who speak from a totally untenable historical position" (Attwell).
