The ego that permits the bad son to write with such seriousness and at such length about his own formation is a sharp weapon when turned inward. The young Knausgaard’s experiences of public abjection are the flip side of a vanity that will not allow him to accept the standards lesser people apply to themselves. He must be the most isolated, the most rejected, the biggest failure. “I had felt I was . . . someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. . . . No one could take loneliness away from me.” As a precocious 19-year-old at a writing school in Bergen, he takes criticism badly, reduced to juvenile provocation by the negative appraisals of the other students. When drunk, he is out of control, capable of violence. His self-hatred becomes literal self-laceration. Prompted by a girlfriend’s friendliness to his brother, he stumbles to a bar toilet and repeatedly scores his cheeks with broken glass. For many other self-cutters, it’s important to hide the traces. Not Knausgaard. Out on the street, his Carrie-like appearance provokes shock and fear. Waking the next morning, he sees what he’s done to his face: “I had ruined it. I looked like a monster.”

Monstrosity, the possibility that he is definitively — and visibly — aberrant or unnatural, haunts Knausgaard in all of these volumes. He almost badgers the reader into telling him not just that he is a bad person, but that he ought to have kept quiet about it. There is something libidinal about this insistence, a species of pride that makes him into a sort of inverted Coriolanus, the stoic warrior who refuses to show his war wounds to the crowd. “My Struggle” is an ecstatic display of woundedness, a platform on which the author can bleed in public.

Early attempts to understand “My Struggle” tended to see it as an unmediated stream, either an artless outpouring or an attempt at radical transparency. For the reader, Knausgaard’s transgressive self-exposure is a guilty pleasure that shares something with the culture of social media and reality TV, and to this extent both these readings have some merit. But Book 5 seems both more controlled and traditional in form than much of what’s gone before, following the conventions of the bildungsroman to tell the story of an unhappy young man who becomes a writer. Frequently bleak, it is also knowing and often extremely funny. His account of reading Celan’s “Death Fugue,” in its entirety, to a girl who’s come over to apologize for sleeping with his brother induces a sympathetic embarrassment that is almost exquisite in its intensity. This is writing that is neither artless nor naïvely transparent.

With only one more book to appear in English, it has become clear that “My Struggle” is a highly literary work, in the sense that its author makes choices, shapes his material and leaves out many things in telling his story. Knausgaard’s own account of the origin of “My Struggle” ­concerned a rejection of the fictionality of fiction, a state of crisis in which he needed to abandon the mimetic straitjacket of the novel to achieve authenticity as a writer. As he wrote in Book 2, “just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.” This disgust for the traditional procedures of fiction, in which “voice” is always a pure performance, safely distant from the writing self (never make the mistake of thinking that I, Dostoyevsky, am Raskolnikov, or that I, Nabokov, am Humbert Humbert), is a challenge to Anglophone literary convention, but is far more common in, say, France, where the tradition of autofiction has been an established object of critical inquiry since at least the 1970s. For those of us who have found “My Struggle” addictive, and want to claim it as a serious work, its shameful nakedness feels important, a kind of writing that asserts the raw value of the “thoughts no one else has and which no one must ever know.” As Knausgaard puts it here, “What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me.”