Soren Kierkegaard

cause unlike what the dimwitted pastor assumes, the sleepless man is not
possessed b ythe Devil, he is possessed b ythe stor y, which he therefore
quite naturall ywishes to repeat. In this repetition he bears a certain similarit y
to the tax collector, but the difference between them can literall ybe seen:
For what the tax collector repeats in his “interior,” the sleepless man has a
notion to repeat in the “exterior”—which the pastor thus managed to pre-
vent, but had he not arrived in time, the catastrophe would have taken
place and the son would have been slaughtered. Ten pages later Johannes
de silentio reenacts the scenario on his textual stage: A pastor has told the
stor yof Abraham, but has done so in such a boring manner that the entire
congregation has fallen asleep, with the exception of that single individual
who “suffered from sleeplessness.” After church services he strolled home
to reflect further upon the matter, but as time passed and the idea began to
take hold, the pastor stepped forward, exclaiming, “Wretch, to let your soul
sink into such foolishness; no miracle will take place.” To this the sleepless
man once again replied with subtle simplicity, “It was only what you
preached about last Sunday.”
The pastor is here portrayed quite mercilessly as a hypocrite who con-
demns what he himself has set in motion. “How does one explain a contra-
diction like this speaker’s?” Johannes de silentio asks. “Is it because Abraham
has acquired a time-honored, customar yright to be regarded as a great man,
so that whatever he does is great, and when someone else does the same
thing it is a sin, a sin that cries out to heaven? In that case I do not wish to
participate in such thoughtless praise. If faith cannot make being willing to
murder one’s son into a hol yact, then let Abraham be subject to the same
judgment as everyone else.” In saying this, Johannes de silentio has sided
with the sleepless man, and he cannot keep himself from writing a short
postscript: “Presumabl y[he] was then executed or sent to the madhouse.
In short, he became unhapp yin relation to so-called realit y; I do think,
though, that in another sense Abraham made him happy.” Once again, the
concluding phrase is startling. The sleepless man ends up either on the scaf-
fold or in a mental institution. And yet Abraham makes him happy. Why?
Because the truth is always on the side of the insane? Because the truth is
never situated in the middle? Perhaps. But presumabl yalso because the stor y
had given the sleepless man a narrative identit ythat released him from the
confines of the pallid bourgeois notion of fate. And Johannes de silentio
ends by saying, “If Abraham is not a nobody, a phantom, a glamorous diver-
sion, then the error can never be that the sinner wants to do likewise.”
It is no accident that Johannes de silentio sympathizes with the sleepless
man, because sleeplessness is not onl ythe appropriate reaction to the reli-
gious terror of the story—sleeplessness also emphasizes that it is to the eye