You have no idea how hard I'm working to NOT title it "Sally and Kara Do Kierkegaard".
In many works of literature, an unreliable narrator is used to add depth to the story, to express views which might get the author in trouble if stated directly, or to open the story to more interpretations. In Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard uses two different unreliable narrators, A and Judge Wilhelm, to illustrate a dichotomy: two views of how one could face life-although this essay will only deal with the temporal aspect of this dichotomy. It will briefly outline the stand each narrator takes on how one should relate to time, then examine each view individually in more depth, before moving on to the comparison of the two and what overall message can be drawn from their juxtaposition.
It should be noted that Kierkegaard uses more than two narrators in Either/Or. In fact, he uses five, and it is never clear how much distance from himself Kierkegaard is trying to establish with this device. For the purposes of this essay, each narrator will be treated as a fictional character creating a fictional work; but since they are characters, it will be assumed that they have a reason for creating their works, just as Kierkegaard himself presumably did. (So, for example, Johannes the Seducer is assumed to be a fictional creation of A, the fictional creation of Victor Eremita, who truly is the fictional creation of Søren Kierkegaard, and that each of these people felt some need to throw a wall between themselves and the created character’s words.) The two narrators with whom this essay is most concerned are A and Judge Wilhelm, whose views are as follows.
A believes that one should take pleasure in the moment, and that if one does not consider one’s present to the best of one’s ability, one will be unhappy-the more temporally dislocated, the more unhappy. Thus, recollection and hope, as ways of dwelling in the past and the future, are to be scorned. B, or Judge Wilhelm, on the other hand, claims that recollection and hope are to be embraced simultaneously, leading to continuity and thence to purpose.
So much for the brief overview; an in-depth look at each of these philosophies will doubtless be not only more comprehensive, but also more comprehensible.
In his short essay, “The Unhappiest One,” A claims, “The unhappy man is absent from himself, never present to himself” (214). Present to oneself is not an intuitively obvious phrase, so perhaps an example would be in order. Think of someone who yearns to get into college far, far away from home, who might have a vivid image of herself slowly cracking open the acceptance letter. When she-call her Sally-is sitting in class thinking about this, she’s not present to herself. But when that envelope with Edge-of-Nowhere University in the return address corner arrives and all her attention is fastened on opening it, she is. By claiming that the unhappy man is never present to himself, A implies that the being present is key to happiness. Applying this concept to our example leads to thinking that Sally, who has worked hard on something which hasn’t come yet (namely, traveling to Edge-of-Nowhere), is less happy than, say, her little sister Kara, who is making her way through high school and also the football team and not worrying about what’s coming next. Since Sally is a driven, nerdy honor student who’s never had a date, this has some surface validity.
A goes on to make some further claims about unhappiness:
The future, for the hoping individual to be present in it, must be real, or rather must acquire reality for him. The past, for the remembering individual to be present in it, must have had reality for him. But when the hoping individual would have a future which can have no reality for him, or the remembering individual remember a past which has had no reality for him, then we have the genuinely unhappy individuals. (215)
In essence, this says that there are some hopes for the future (and memories of the past) which can provide some happiness, although not as much as if one were living in the present. But when one isn’t even able to really dwell in those hopes or recollections, one is truly miserable. So let’s say that Sally is still thinking about going to Edge-of-Nowhere University, and thinking about opening that acceptance letter-that would be a hope which could still bring her happiness, even though it brought her out of the present. But once Sally remembers the big fight she had with her parents about overpriced, private institutions and no daughter of theirs was going to travel out-of-state alone, she can’t dwell in her acceptance-letter dream, and she’s truly despondent.
But, A tells us, he has the solution! Sally simply needs to forget. A doesn’t mean what one would expect with that advice, though.
Being able to forget depends always on how one remembers, but how one remembers depends in turn on how one experiences reality. The person who sticks fast in it with the momentum of hope will remember in a way that makes him unable to forget. 234
A means that, rather than trying to forget or remember specific events, one should work harder at forgetting the affect which accompanied them. Sally, for example, rather than trying to forget the row with her parents, should forget the upset she felt at having her hopes dashed, and forget the anticipation with which she viewed her hope. “One talks it round and in doing so deprives is of its bite” (235). In this manner, no hurt remains in the memory. This removing of sting is what A means by saying, “Having perfected the art of forgetting and the art of remembering, one is then in a position to play battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence” (234).
A eschews hope and remembering in part because they tie one down; in longing for things past, we hold ourselves to one thing, and that, A says, is boring. “‘Boredom is a root of all evil’” (227). Even if not meant literally, this fits with A’s general philosophy, which is to include variety and amusement in his life, and to avoid commitment.
Judge Wilhelm, on the other hand, has a very different take on the situation. Judge Wilhelm encourages commitments, because they do give one ties to other times. “[Time] is not just a simple progression in which what was there originally is preserved, but a growing progression in which what was there originally increases” (465). Instead of events simply following each other, they build on one another; Sally getting her acceptance letter reflects the fight she had with her parents and leads into her sitting in the quad.
The healthy individual lives in both hope and recollection, at one and the same time, and it is only through this that his life acquires true, substantial continuity. Accordingly, he has hope, and unlike those individuals who live only in recollection, he does not want to go back in time. But then what does recollection do for him, since it must surely have some influence? It puts a cross on the note of the instant; the further back recollection goes, the more frequent the repetition and the more crosses. (465-466)
There is very little way to rephrase B’s words above without being just as confusing as the originals. Considered in terms of Sally, however, it is a bit more manageable. If she is healthy, she “lives in both hope and recollection,” the first part of this simply meaning that she has a goal. Because Sally has a goal, she has something else to focus on and doesn’t feel the constant regret over past actions. However, recollection of events past makes the present instant more complex, because every last bit of those past events is bound up in and part of the present. The healthy person, B argues, realizes that.
This might be even clearer when one compares Sally to her little sister Kara. Kara, earlier in the essay, was shown as an aesthetic (or at least more of one than Sally.) She went through life as it came, living in the present. Consider her as B would see her, though: Kara doesn’t have a hope, because she doesn’t care about college. She barely cares about high school! Because of this, what do her experiences provide? Always assuming that Kara doesn’t have some other long term goal (a large assumption, but plausible, given that Kara is a teenager), they provide nothing, because no connecting thread causes them to resonate. They are isolated incidents, where Judge Wilhelm’s argument is that connection and continuity are the key to a good life. Further, because Kara has no goal, she has no reason to keep going. Where Sally has her driving, all-consuming purpose of getting into Edge-of-Nowhere University, Kara has nothing.
Thus, contrary to A’s insistence that commitments are the weak-point that boredom will exploit, B argues that commitments are the only way to give life meaning and purpose. Naturally, B views purpose as a good thing, just as A views not-being-bored as a good thing; and, just as B has some great justification if he claims that A is without purpose, A would have great cause to accuse B of being boring. In the text, B is a rather stodgy judge; if one applied it to Sally and Kara, one has to admit that Sally’s nose-to-the-grindstone-dear-God-get-me-out-of-here approach is tedious.