All 8 chapters — from the ironic preface to the epilogue on faith as the highest passion.
Fear and Trembling is short — about 120 pages — and its structure is musical. A preface sets the satirical key. The Exordium presents four imagined versions of the Moriah story, each showing how a lesser man would have failed. A Eulogy on Abraham gives the lyrical centre. The Preliminary Expectoration introduces the two knights — resignation and faith — and the vocabulary of the absurd. Then three sustained arguments: Problema I (the teleological suspension of the ethical), Problema II (the absolute duty to God), Problema III (Abraham's silence toward Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac). The Epilogue is brief and ironic: faith is the highest passion, and no generation gets further.
Satire, four imagined journeys, and the praise of Abraham.
A dry, ironic declaration of method: Johannes de Silentio is not a philosopher, not a subscriber to the System, not an optimist about the age's philosophical ambitions. He writes for luxury. What follows will not be summarized into categories.
Four imagined versions of the Moriah journey, each showing how a lesser man would have failed or been broken by what Abraham performed. A man who loves the story admits he cannot understand it. The four variations serve as overture.
The lyrical centre of the book. A eulogy on Abraham that moves from his departure from Ur through the decades of waiting for Isaac to the binding on Moriah. Abraham was great by a strength whose power is weakness, a wisdom whose secret is folly, a love which is hatred of self.
The knight of resignation, the knight of faith, and the absurd.
The conceptual engine of the book. The knight of infinite resignation vs. the knight of faith. The movement by virtue of the absurd. A portrait of what the knight of faith might look like on the street in Copenhagen. The impossibility of mediation.
Three arguments from the same scene; three refusals of the Hegelian answer.
The first and most famous argument. If the ethical is the highest, Abraham is a murderer. Kierkegaard's alternative: there is a teleological suspension of the ethical, a moment in which the individual is higher than the universal — and Abraham is its only instance in the Hebrew Bible.
The second argument: whether there is an absolute, direct duty toward God that is not mediated through the ethical. Kierkegaard refuses to soften Luke 14:26. The paradox of faith reduces every other duty to the relative and cannot be mediated back into the universal without destroying it.
The longest and most aesthetically intricate of the three arguments. Through a comparison of aesthetic hiddenness, ethical disclosure, and the paradox of faith, Kierkegaard shows why Abraham could not tell Sarah, Eliezer, or Isaac what God had asked — and why this silence is not a failure but the structural mark of the religious stage.
Faith is the highest passion. No one gets further.
Brief and ironic. Faith is the highest passion; no generation begins further along than the last, and none gets past it. The Epilogue closes with a joke about Heraclitus and a disciple who improved a living observation into a dead abstraction — which is what the age does to faith.