Kierkegaard, the Novelist’s Philosopher (post 2): His Pseudonyms are the Autonomous Characters and Alternate Narrators of his Multiple Personality

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.