The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

All generations live their lives as if they are the first, gathering experiences, progressing onward through the years, and as insights accumulate, meaning diminishes, or if it doesn’t diminish, it at least becomes less self-evident. That’s the way it is. The question is whether it has always been that way. In the Old Testament, where everything is expressed through action and the narratives are closely bound up with physical reality, and in the ancient Greek epics, where lives unfold in similarly concrete fashion, doubt never comes from within, as a condition of the individual’s existence, but always from without, by some external occurrence, for instance a sudden death, and is thus bound up with the conditions of external, earthly life. The New Testament, however, is different. How might we otherwise explain the darkness in Jesus’ soul that eventually drove him to Jerusalem, there to close door upon door until only the last and simplest remained? His final days can be interpreted as a way of eliminating all choices, so that responsibility for what was to happen, his slow death on the cross, would not be his, since he would be directed there, so to speak, by the will of others. The same thing occurs in Hamlet, his soul too is darkened, he too approaches his demise with open eyes, in such a way that it appears governed by fate and thereby inevitable. In the case of King Oedipus it is fate, he is genuinely oblivious, but for both Hamlet and Jesus it is a choice they make an...