Narratives of a life: Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle as a literary centaur

In a narrative in relation to his six‐volume novel My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård has continually maintained that the novel is devoid of literary ambition and even anti‐literary. In this article I seek to challenge this narrative as I demonstrate how My Struggle employs a number of characteristics that we normally associate with fiction, and that Knausgård indeed seeks condensation and drama in his writing despite claiming the opposite. In doing so, I underline the plot‐based ambition in the novel, as Knausgård's alter ego strives for social acceptance. In the last part of the article I argue that Knausgård uses his own biography in what I call narratives of life in an attempt to reinstate the subject at a time when it has generally been declared dead. In doing so, Knausgård seems to reawaken the tradition of the great modernist novel of the early twentieth century.