indirect communication

Kierkegaard's authorship was written behind the mask of several pseudonymous characters he created to represent different ways of thinking. This was part of Kierkegaard's indirect communication. Kierkegaard wrote this way in order to prevent his works from being treated as a philosophical system with a systematic structure. In the Point of View, Kierkegaard wrote: "In the pseudonymous works, there is not a single word which is mine. I have no opinion about these works except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning, except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them."

Kierkegaard used indirect communication to make it difficult to ascertain whether he actually held any of the views presented in his works. He hoped readers would simply read the work at face value without attributing it to some aspect of his life. Kierkegaard also did not want his readers to treat his work as an authoritative system, but rather look to themselves for interpretation.

It's the same mechanism used on Milton Erickson's open trance work and Coetzee's dialogues on Elizabeth Costello to create contraposition and tension.