I think the explanation for this flip comes from Knausgård's choice of a title. "My Struggle" can't help but evoke Hitler's autobiography of the same name. An odd decision for a person who doesn't seem to share any other interests with the man (at least after 400 or so pages into his life). But I believe he makes an allusion that holds the key to this decision. Early on in My Struggle Knausgård references the fact that when a history is lost or misremembered, people often simply invent their own history to achieve political or imperial goals. Perhaps the title of this epic is a self-loathing nod to his pursuit of goals that he judges harshly.

He is saying that he knows what he is doing is bad. He is ascribing words that people likely never spoke exactly. He is airing personal and family drama for the world to see. But in order to define himself and to do so as a creative form of expression perhaps he has no choice. Perhaps he is commenting on the fact that he has no choice but to lie because that's what fiction is. And the act of remembering is to create fiction. We are, at the end of the day, creatures with imperfect memories who have no choice but to put together loose evidence offered up by our memories of memories in a pathetic attempt to define who we are. Knausgård seems to be acutely aware of this self-creation through fiction. And in knowing that he is creating a fiction in the pursuit of creating an external remembered self he both bares himself nude before the scrutinizing eyes of his readers and winks knowingly in light of the fact that every contour of that bare-chested sincerity is potentially an unsolvable enigma.

I'm forced to think of Borges' "Funes the Memorious" along with Proust of course, as well as the deviously imperfect memory that narrates Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.