The distinction between these two types of character, one archaic and one modern, touches on the distinction between characters portrayed entirely through their outward lives and characters who have their own inner livse. These differences are essential, and mysterious, and can really only mean two things: Either people in earlier eras were radically different from modern people, in other words they did not actually have an inner life in our understanding of the term, an autonomous self reflecting on itself. Or else only the depictions are different, and thus the conceptions of what is essential and inessential to a person. The question is whether these two possibilities aren’t, in the final analysis, the same.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Fate”, in The Land of the Cyclops, translated by Martin Aitken