Ever sinceEither/Or had come out Kierkegaard had contemplated some sort of supplement to that work. Now, in light of the notions and views for which he had found expression in the interim, he felt even more urgently the need to revise the impression made by his early authorship. Adding a further section to Either/Or was one possibility that crossed his mind – a section on his own tribulations to conclude the second part, balancing the seducer's diary concluding the first. The idea would be to make Wilhelm's solution look too easy. But by this time Kierkegaard had realized that doing justice to what Either/Or failed to bring to light would require a separate publication.

If it was still uncertain in Kierkegaard's mind where his authorship was heading, part of that uncertainty must have been due to the complexity of the motivations driving him to write. Since what was vitally important to him personally was that he should be the one to decide in the end what role the writings should be seen to have in the longer term, not unnaturally the extent and nature of Either/Or's reception made him extra wary. Not least because of the ‘Diary’, Victor Eremita's accidental compilation had achieved a celebrity which quite overlooked ethics and religion. Indeed, the very name had acquired a standing in literary circles and was in danger of upstaging any that Kierkegaard, whose authorial intentions became increasingly inscrutable as the pseudonyms and genres proliferated, might have intended for himself.