Choosing a way of life › Whose argument are we reading?

Someone can spend so long examining possible lives that the examination becomes their way of living. Another person makes a commitment, then discovers that keeping it involves much more than the original decision. Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or brings these possibilities into conflict through writers whose voices cannot simply be treated as the author's own.

The question is what distinguishes a life organized around interesting possibilities from one in which a person takes responsibility for becoming someone in particular. The book gives that question a literary form. Its fictional editor presents papers he claims to have discovered, rather than a sequence of conclusions directly signed by Kierkegaard.

Either/Or appeared in 1843. Its purported editor is Victor Eremita, who describes finding the papers in a writing desk. This discovery belongs to the book's fiction. It supplies the frame through which the reader encounters different accounts of how to live.

Eremita calls the first writer A. The second is B, identified as a judge named Vilhelm, also rendered Wilhelm or William in English discussions. B's papers are letters addressed to A. Their relationship therefore matters: the ethical argument arrives as one person's effort to persuade another, rather than an impersonal theorem.

The first part contains several kinds of writing. There are short reflections as well as extended discussions of music and tragedy. “Crop Rotation” proposes an approach to avoiding boredom. “The Seducer's Diary” introduces another layer of narration around Johannes and his relationship with Cordelia.

That structure requires care with attribution. A's recommendation is not automatically Kierkegaard's recommendation. A criticism made by the judge is a claim to be examined in the encounter between the voices. The form gives readers a reason to ask what each speaker understands about the other, rather than collecting sentences as the author's personal advice.