ABSTRACT
This story is based closely on Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition. In Kierkegaard’s story, the main character is a gentleman esthete (Constantin Constantius) whose young friend commits the serious 19th-century offense of jilting his betrothed. In this story, a college professor (John Deere) mentors a student who commits the serious 21st-century offense of refusing to sleep with his girlfriend. In a trip to Washington D.C., the professor seeks the resolution of a repeated aesthetic moment, while his student seeks the repetition of an ethical one. The failure of both repetitions points to Kierkegaard’s true repetition: a religious leap to faith. The explication discusses Kierkegaard’s rejection of traditional legalistic Christianity, aesthetic liberalism, and Hegelianism, which led him to develop the first (albeit, perhaps, parochial) philosophy of the moment.
