The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
Published 1913 · 115,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays
How hard is The Tragic Sense of Life to read?
The Tragic Sense of Life scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 76 out of 100
- Theological and philosophical vocabulary drawn from scholasticism, German idealism and Protestant divinity, with Latin and Greek quoted untranslated.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Long, insistent, repetitive periods that circle a point rather than advancing on it, in the manner of a lecture delivered under pressure.
- Abstraction: 92 out of 100
- Sustained metaphysical argument about immortality, faith and reason, with almost no narrative or example to rest on.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Engages Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche and Christian dogmatics, assuming the reader already knows them.
- Narrative indirection: 44 out of 100
- Unamuno states his positions bluntly in the first person, though he refuses to say which of his contradictory statements he finally holds.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The man of flesh and bone, the hunger for immortality and Don Quixote as knight of faith operate as figures that carry the argument.
- Ironic distance: 56 out of 100
- He mocks the philosophers he needs and his own need for them, and takes a certain pleasure in leaving the reader without the comfort the book seems to promise.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- The whole book is an argument for refusing resolution; it ends by recommending that the contradiction be kept alive rather than settled.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- Eleven essays that circle back on each other rather than build, with a concluding chapter that turns the whole treatise into a reading of a novel.
How The Tragic Sense of Life is regarded
The Tragic Sense of Life holds a literary regard score of 78 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.