Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is described as a solipsistic epic. In fact, it’s about openness to the world. Photograph by Martin Lengemann / laif / Redux

Five volumes in, there’s still a temptation to redeem Karl Ove Knausgaard from egotism—to find, in his multi-volume autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” some subject other than Karl Ove's life, some theme profound enough to justify these thousands of pages. Earlier this month, in an essay on the fifth volume in The New Republic, Ryu Spaeth argued that “My Struggle” is “actually a commentary on contemporary life in the West, a sweeping novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky.” Other critics have likened Knausgaard to Proust, whose novel wasn’t just a life story but a philosophical meditation on aesthetics, time, and selfhood. The final volume, it’s thought, will reveal the novel’s grand intellectual design.

I’m sympathetic to these readings of the book, but something in me resists. When I tally up the pleasures and surprises “My Struggle” has given me, I find that they have little to do with intellectual subjects. The book isn’t really about politics, aesthetics, or the nature of society. Instead, “My Struggle” has pushed me to think more about my own self, and, in particular, my emotions. It’s reacquainted me with the vividness of feelings. It’s a sentimental education.

Volume five of “My Struggle,” which is called “Some Rain Must Fall” in the U.K. edition, covers a difficult period in Karl Ove’s life—his twenties, more or less. As it opens, he is nineteen and entering the Writing Academy in Bergen; by the end, he has published a well-received novel. The years leading up to that success, however, are unhappy and sometimes unhinged. Karl Ove spends years laboring over a few terrible pages of fiction (helpfully reprinted, in full, by Knausgaard). He falls in love, has his heart broken, gets married, cheats, and gets divorced. He drinks too much and becomes a petty thief and vandal. He works long hours at a mental institution and on an oil rig in the North Sea. He also commits two shocking acts of violence—one against himself, the other against someone he loves. They seem to issue from a misery so unbearable that those ordinary woes can’t account for it.

In previous volumes, we’ve watched a younger Karl Ove struggle to absorb his father’s dark energies. In the new volume, his dad is no longer abusive—he’s started a new family in another part of Norway—but he’s become suicidally alcoholic; his darkness has turned inward. Karl Ove, having long wished his father dead, is now driven nearly crazy by the fact that the man is actually dying. It’s Karl Ove’s anxious mixture of fear, sadness, guilt, and anger that makes “My Struggle” seem, at times, Dostoyevskian: he feels, and sometimes acts, like a murderer. (Early in the volume, when he learns that a murder has taken place in his neighborhood, he imagines himself as a killer on the run.) Even so, reading this fifth volume, I felt more acutely than usual that I was rooting for Karl Ove. The novel is affecting not just because of his sadness but because of his determination, often foiled, to wring his father's poison out of his life—his only hope for achieving a semblance of happiness and sanity. “I had to get rid of him,” Knausgaard told Andrew O’Hagan, in a 2014 interview. “That has been my project—to get rid of his presence inside of me.”

Mental anguish of the sort Karl Ove experiences emanates not just from other people but from their echoes in one’s own life and personality. Such anguish can feel formless, like an atmosphere; it’s helpful, therefore, to give it a metaphorical shape. For Karl Ove, the metaphor is one of enclosure. He feels locked in a cage no matter where he is. Claustrophobia, like all feelings, has a rhythm. When Karl Ove discovers some experience that gives him psychic space—when he stumbles upon a place where “the world opens,” as he often puts it—he looks around in wonder and asks himself, How long can I stay?

The answer, always, is not long. In the new volume, Karl Ove dates a wholesome and happy young woman named Gunvor. She is levelheaded and confident, thoughtful and easygoing, comfortable and loving with her family—from his perspective, practically an extraterrestrial. Gunvor shares her open world with Karl Ove. Still, he knows it will never be his; eventually, he ends the relationship. Looking back over all five volumes, it's striking how much of Karl Ove’s life has been spent auditioning routes to freedom. He’s tried music, drinking, sex, but those experiences end too soon. In the latest volume, longer-lasting alternatives present themselves. At the university, Karl Ove studies literature and begins to read history and criticism. Reading these books, he can feel “something being opened up”: