SOURCE: "Kierkegaard and the Novel," in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, edited by Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, pp. 114-28.

In the following essay, Josipovici discusses Kierkegaard's views of fiction and fiction writers, illuminating the parallels between these views and Kierkegaard's doctrine of existence.

My intention is not to write here about Kierkegaard as novelist, though that would be an interesting subject. After all, each of his pseudonymous works is in a sense an attempt to extend the range of fiction, and I can see no good reason why they should be dumped in a box marked 'Philosophy', while Sterne's Tristram Shandy, for example, or Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground are dumped in one marked 'Literature'.

However, to write about Kierkegaard as novelist implies that we know what a novel is, and what is really interesting about Kierkegaard is that he raises questions about that very issue...