For the most part, the Confessions is reminiscent of the Book of Job in the Old Testament, except that in this case it's written in the first-person, and Satan is more like a guilty conscience, or a superego if you will. Bear in mind that Augustine would have been in his mid-forties when he wrote this, so I'm making a guess that he is going through some kind of mid-life crisis, and realizes that he's growing old, perhaps becoming subconsciously more aware of the stark reality of death.
I don't know whether that is true or not, but at least for me it helps contextualize his depressingly melodramatic confessions to god.
Augustine praises god profusely and continuously scolds himself for having sinned so much. I found it particularly funny when he began to recount his juvenile days. He had stolen some tasteless pears from a nearby orchard with his friends and in his confession seemed genuinely shameful of something he did over 20 years ago. Augustine describes how "Wickedness filled me" (2. 29) as he and his boys furtively stole into the night. I have to admit I chuckled a bit as I was reading this part.
Of course it was stealing nonetheless. But including juvenile delinquencies in your confessions to God seems borderline extreme to me; may be even comical. In any case, I suppose he's using this trivial example to elaborate on a more profound point--the inherently sinful nature of humans.
The Confessions (so far) follows the general arc of a strictly chronological autobiography that is dictated by how sinful Augustine's life has been. Early on in Book 1, he investigates selfish instincts in infants as a proxy for his own infancy. One brother would jealously "glare" (1. 9) at his other baby brother as he is given milk. He also describes how newborn babies would, because they lack the ability to communicate, violently thrash about to get what they want (1.70), further attesting to early signs of selfishness. In school at Carthage, Augustine describes how he disliked Greek literature because of how hypocritically adulterous the gods are portrayed as. He admits that he only did well in reciting Greek stories to escape the cane and be praised for his intelligence. As a young boy, he was defiant of god and only concerned with personal self-benefit.
The other general theme that all of Augustine's confessions seem to point to, besides the nature of human imperfections, is the wholly perfect nature of god. God, to Augustine, is both transcendent and immanent, which creates a theological inconsistency. The death of his close friend (Bk 4) naturally makes Augustine very sad. The problem is, god created all of this. All humans, and thus all human relations and emotions, are god's creations. If god is ultimately perfection embodied, then how can he create something imperfect, or how can the products of his creation possibly be unhappy?
So these are the two concepts, or themes, I picked up in my reading of the first five books: inherently sinful humans in juxtaposition with an immaculate and transcendent Creator. They are two intricately bound notions, and are mutually dependent--one cannot exist without the other (the absence of one would at the very least detract from the agency of the other.) In this sense, they could possibly relate as binary opposites.
The plot of Confessions does not pick up speed, unlike other epics we've read so far. But Augustine does go into meticulous detail in his confessions on why he claims that his mistakes define him as a human. So far, his confessions represent a struggle to find out what why the Creator made humans, and whether humans could even conceivably come close to perfection.
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