SOURCE: Koelb, Clayton. “Wrestling with Proteus: Irony in Kierkegaard's Either/Or.” In Narrative Ironies, edited by A. Prier and Gerald Gillespie, pp. 21-31. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

In the following essay, Koelb explores Kierkegaard's use of irony in Either/Or, particularly in his discussion of Eugène Scribe's The First Love.

The love of recollection is the only happy love, says an author who, so far as I am acquainted with him, is sometimes rather deceitful.

Søren Kierkegaard

Irony prefers oblique refraction. It says not so much the opposite to what is meant as something other than. …

Lilian R. Furst

The first quotation is an example of the oblique, refractive irony Lilian Furst refers to in the second.¹ The irony resides in the fact that the “rather deceitful” author being quoted in these opening lines from “Repetition” is none other than Søren Kierkegaard himself, so that the judgment...