Abstract

The text unfolds in a series of episodes, chapters, narratives, as the narrator/persona confronts the various narratives in which he/she is embedded and searches for meaning between or above a world of contradiction--the desperation of the search invites incoherence and a failure to consider contradictory materials. The "Apology" and "Epilogue" supply the frame within which these searching and poetic chapters emerge. The chapters develop as follows: The "Apology" orients the study to its narrator and to his exploration of the works of Soren Kierkegaard. The "Introduction" initiates the student's search into the concept of indirection, especially as it relates to narrative, and the possibility of fictions as somehow offering existential meaning and/or resolution. Chapter One, "Kierkegaard's Indirect Communication," looks at Kierkegaard's authorship. Chapter Two, "The Indirection of Religious Language: Narrative Theology," pursues a context, some historical allies, for the thought of Kierkegaard. Chapter Three, "Our Indirect, Storied Past, Future" argues for the primacy of fiction, narrative and the necessity of indirection to individual and community existence. The fourth chapter, "Mimetic Considerations: A Mythology of Imitation," deals with the subjective and existential persuasion of story/art, its power of staging a space in which we reconstruct, create, recreate and/or perform. Chapter Five, "Drugs and Enchantment: Platonic Myth," pursues the Platonic use of myth in regard to the ideals of society and the individuals identity within it. Finally, an "Appendix" is included, dealing with the contrast between the two cultures from which religious thought in the West have grown, Greece and Israel, and the differences in their conception of religion and how it is expressed. The "Epilogue" returns again to the discomfort of existence, an existence of obscurity, incoherence, and skepticism--but an existence of immense creative possibility