Soren Kierkegaard

ment: “He confided in me with a charming frankness (which I will not
abuse, since he is dead) that the reason he called on me was that he had
need of a confidant.” And when the Young Man refused to accept the
cynical strategy that Constantin Constantius had proposed for him, the ex-
planation was that he did not have “the strength to carr yout the plan,”
though in the manuscript Kierkegaard had originall ywritten “he shot him-
self.” At another point, in similar fashion “the memor yof his death” is
changed in the margin to “the memor yof his disappearance.”
It cannot be determined when the suicide originall ytook place, because
after the Young Man’s next-to-last letter, dated Februar y17, Kierkegaard
used a pair of scissors to rid himself of five leaves from his manuscript note-
book, of which at least four had definitel ybeen written upon. Judging from
the scant ybits of writing that survive along the inner margins, next to the
binding, these five leaves (constituting ten small pages) seem to have con-
tained critical commentar yabout the Young Man’s tempestuous expecta-
tions of an imminent repetition, which might indicate that the text had
some similarit ywith the protest-filled passage Constantin Constantius in-
serted into the final version. This still leaves seven mysterious pages which,
it ma ybe assumed, also contained a dramatic scene, for it must have been
at this point that the unhappy youth terminated his terribly young life, pre-
sumabl yin despair over the absence of repetition.
True, putting a bullet in one’s head is not an original literar ysolution to
crises of the soul, but the various interventions in the text were not under-
taken with an eye to originality. If our young hero first committed suicide
because of the absence of repetition—and was thereafter revived in order
to proclaim a parod yof repetition—it was because, during the time that
elapsed between the writing of the first lines in the first manuscript note-
book and the writing of the final lines in the second, the book’s real reader
had quite definitivel ydisappointed the author’s hope for a repetition: In Jul y
1843 Regine had become engaged to someone else. Period. But whereas in
Repetition, the Young Man had contented himself with losing the newspaper
in which he had read of his beloved’s engagement, Kierkegaard himself lost
faith inRepetitionas an indirect communication to Regine. ThusRepetition
was originall yto have served as a rejection of a possible repetition of their
relationship, and this had been s ymbolicall yexpressed b ythe suicide of the
Young Man. After Regine’s engagement, however, this indirect communi-
cation had become meaningless, and the Young Man could therefore be
revived so that Kierkegaard could claim that the repetition he had con-
cerned himself with wasnota repetition of the relationship with the woman,
Regine, but rather a religious repetition that makes possible a person’s re-
cover yor reacquisition of himself. A confusing displacement now arises