Soren Kierkegaard

Here the Young Man has rewritten Job’s questions in a modern, absurdist
manifesto whose furious call for meaning fades into silence. While Job had
God as the focal point of his conflict, the Young Man cannot even find
“the manager” who could guarantee that there is a meaning behind the
meaninglessness and abolish the iron ythat is afoot in language, which “sa ys
one thing and means another.” The distance between true and false lan-
guage repeats the distance between the Young Man and the stor yof Job.
For at the ver ymoment he identifies himself with Job, he must make the
painful admission that this identification does not give him a new identity.
“Job’s tormented soul bursts forth with a might ycr y. I understand these
words and make them m yown,” he writes characteristicall y. But then,
smiling and suffering in equal measure, he continues: “At the same time, I
sense the contradiction and I smile at myself as one smiles at a little child
who has put on his father’s clothing.” The Young Man is aware that he is
incapable of repeating Job’s stor ybecause however passionatel yhe reads
himself into the stor yand inscribes himself in it, it alwa ys remains one size
too large!
Gradually, as his febrile fascination subsides, the Young Man gives a more
subdued account of the greatness of Job, which in his opinion inheres in
the unyielding manner in which Job insisted that he was right. Job knew
that hewasright, but he did not know the extent to which he wouldget
his rights, and therefore the entire interval, all the wa yup until his final
assurance, remained an ordeal—“for since an ordeal is atemporarycategory,
it iseo ipsodefined with reference to time and must therefore be abolished
in time.” The Young Man explains himself: “Job is blessed and has received
everythingdouble.—This is what is called arepetition. My, doesn’t a thunder-
storm feel good!”
Since this is the first time the Young Man uses the word “repetition” in
his letters, it is disappointing to see him use it so literall yas almost to render
it banal, assigning it a quite different meaning than Constantin Constantius
had given it in the book’s introduction. Matters do not improve when the
Young Man then tells us that he himself is now simpl yawaiting a “thunder-
storm—and repetition.” Despite his several attempts to explain his meteoro-
logical metaphor, he remains rather foggy. “What is this thunderstorm sup-
posed to bring about?” he asks quite properly. And he answers his own
question: “It is to make me fit to be a husband. It will crush the whole
of my personality. I am ready. It will make me almost unrecognizable to
myself....Ifthethunderstorm does not come, I will become sly.”
And the reader, too, is beginning to become a bit sly, entertaining the
sneaking suspicion that something is about to go completel yha ywire here.
Therefore the reader applauds when Constantin Constantius inserts a pro-