Kierkegaard's Style

When I first began reading Kierkegaard's Repetition I felt like I was rereading sentences multiple times to decipher his meaning. Since it is philospohical explanation about the necessity of repeition in one's life, sometimes the circular ways of reasoning threw me for a loop. Once I adjusted to the basic flow of his writing and started to wrap my head around his ideas, two specific parts of his writing I found to be very effective to keeping me attentive.

Every so often, Kierkegaard would use a very compact and meaningful similes to convey his ideas. One in particular that stood out was: "Of what good is an armchair of velvet when the rest of the environment does not match; it is like a man going around naked and wearing a three-cornered hat." If he only commented on the armchair agitating his sense of repeition, I would have certainly had to have read it multiple times. I enjoyed these compact statements, however, that gave me an image to encapsulate his emotions rather than dilluted explantations of them.

The other aspect of writing I wanted to note is how descriptive he is just to set the scene. The exmaple here would be when he first arrives in Berlin and describes Gensd'arme Square. In the passage his recollection of a room where "...the pale light of the moon blends with the strong light from the inner room," caught my attention. the entire passage is descriptive enough that you could visualize the room, the furniture, the lighting, and his memory of it being the most beautiful place he had ever seen. This memory helps support his idea of recollection setting standards that will only lead to dissapointment in the future, and is done so vividly it is easy to understand why he feels this way.