Miguel de Unamuno and the Novel as Philosophy

After moving away from the positivism that he practiced in his youth, Unamuno found in narrative fiction the means to formulate and expose his thinking. This article examines and specifies in which moments of his literary work he explores some of the topics that will be central in his philosophy of maturity (interiority, individuality, contradiction), analyzes his evolution as a fiction writer from his Cuadernos de Juventud to his latest published texts, shows how he concentrates on writing novels breaking aesthetic models of naturalistic realism and approaching the modernist paradigms and exposes how the use of literary resources typical of modernism is what allows Unamuno to delve into the epistemic problems that most concern him: self-knowledge, the encounter with external reality, and the possibility of linguistically exposing our particular way of experiencing the contradiction between individuality and the world of others. Finally, this article explains the concept of the novel that Unamuno formulates based on his writing practice and reviews examples that allow us to identify why the aesthetics of his fiction writing is a clear attempt to make the novel (nivola) a form of knowledge.