Either/Or

Summary

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life appeared in Copenhagen on 20 February 1843 in two volumes, signed by no author. Its 'editor', Victor Eremita, explains in a preface that he found the papers in a secret drawer of an old writing desk bought from a second-hand dealer, which sprang open only when he struck it with a hatchet. The papers come from two hands. Victor calls the first author simply A, a young man of refined taste and no settled occupation; the second, B, is a magistrate named William whose long letters are addressed to A. Victor declines to say which view is right, and Kierkegaard keeps his own name out of the book. Volume One gives A's papers. It opens with the Diapsalmata, a sequence of aphorisms full of wit, boredom and melancholy. A long essay on the 'immediate erotic stages' argues that Mozart's Don Giovanni is the perfect classic because music alone can express sensuous desire, and traces three stages through Cherubino, Papageno and Don Giovanni himself. Further essays, read to an imagined society of the dead, the Symparanekromenoi, compare ancient and modern tragedy through a reimagined Antigone, sketch three abandoned women (Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira and Goethe's Margarete), seek 'the unhappiest one', and review a Scribe comedy. 'Rotation of Crops' offers a mock-serious method for escaping boredom by arbitrariness, forgetting and the avoidance of friendship, marriage and official posts. The volume ends with 'The Seducer's Diary', which A claims to have found: the record of Johannes, who coldly engineers a young woman's engagement and its breaking for the sake of the experience. Volume Two answers. In 'The Esthetic Validity of Marriage' William argues that marriage does not kill first love but preserves and deepens it in time. 'The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality' urges A to choose himself in earnest, to accept his concrete history with repentance, and to see that refusing to choose is itself despair. The book closes with an 'Ultimatum': a sermon by a Jutland pastor, forwarded by William, on the upbuilding thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong. Kierkegaard wrote much of the book in Berlin in the winter of 1841–42, soon after the broken engagement, and the question of what a vow means runs through both volumes. Victor's preface invites the reader to make the decision the book will not make for him. Content note: the Seducer's Diary depicts deliberate emotional manipulation without explicit scenes; teachers should excerpt it with care.

Top Lessons

• Not choosing is a choice

  Judge William's central claim is that A's refusal to commit is not neutrality but a decision to let moods govern him, and that this hovering ends in despair. The book stages the argument without a narrator's verdict so that the reader, too, must decide.

• Seduction as a counterfeit art

  The Seducer's Diary shows aesthetic refinement turned against a person. Johannes treats Cordelia as material for an experience he designs, and the cruelty lies in his calculation, not in passion. Students should notice how A himself shudders at the diary he presents.

• Marriage gives first love a history

  William argues against the romantic assumption that love dies when it becomes duty. Marriage, for him, takes the immediacy of first love into time and makes it a shared life. His case can be weighed alongside Scripture's account of covenant faithfulness.

• Masks, voices and honest citation

  Kierkegaard wrote through pseudonyms and later asked readers not to attribute their words to him. Reading Either/Or well means citing A, William or Victor Eremita by name and asking what each voice can see that the others cannot.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Melancholy is a sustained subject in the book rather than a passing mood. A's aphorisms and essays describe boredom, reflective grief and an incapacity to live in the present, and Judge William's second letter discusses melancholy directly, treating it not as an illness to be medicated but as a spiritual condition rooted in the refusal to choose oneself. Kierkegaard's journals and his father's well-known melancholy are often read into these pages; such biographical connections, and any retrospective diagnosis of the author, are interpretations rather than facts.

• Volume One, Diapsalmata

  Aphorisms in which A describes his boredom, sorrow and sense of futility with ironic detachment.

• Volume One, 'The Unhappiest One'

  An address on the person who lives always in hope or recollection and never in the present, a portrait of reflective unhappiness.

• Volume Two, 'The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical'

  Judge William analyses melancholy and despair, arguing that they arise when a person will not choose himself in earnest.