I just finished reading Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It’s not a long novel, somewhere around 250 pages with the copy I was reading and pretty quick as far as density goes. This book came highly recommended to me by a street performer I met in England this past summer. I spoke with him after he had finished playing a rendition of “Your Song” by Elton John on his guitar and my only reason for approaching him in the first place was to let him know (in different words) that if his voice were a girl I would marry her. We got to talking and I found out that he had a degree in English, which got us to talking about literature. He was very interested in modernist literature and after I mentioned that I hadn’t had much in the way of modernism, he told me that I needed to read Hunger immediately. I didn’t quite get to it before now but break gave me a good bunch of time for reading and so here I am.
Hamsun addresses a few issues very well throughout his novel. The novel is very psychological and the exploration (both externally and through the narrator) of the mind of the main character, the narrator, is incredibly fascinating. The novel follows a freelance writer as he strives to fight off poverty and make sense of his own hunger-induced madness. A small theme, though of perhaps the most interest to me, is the narrator’s reliance on his religious faith during times of abundance as opposed to times of scarcity. Along with this theme is the narrator’s urge, created through his interpretation of the societal gaze, to identify his natural desires as unnecessary. Hunger is a constant problem for the narrator but he considers himself a better man when he triumphs over this most basic of urges. Hamsun, it seems, is attempting to critcize humanity’s attempt at bettering ourselves by casting off our natural desires as nothing more than non-essential, secondary objectives in the face of the more important agenda of bettering our appearance to society.
My only problem with this novel is that it’s very bland. Hamsun has some excellent insights but the plot is not strong enough to support any intellectual exploration that is going on. The life of this starving writer is confusing and frustrating partially because his madness obscures his own idea of the truth at some points and because he is unwilling to do everything he can do dig himself out of the financial hole he placed himself in. This gets back to the theme I mentioned earlier, which is interesting in its own right, but the narrator never truly transcends it. One of my professors would probably say that he is trying to beat the system by playing by the prescribed rules set down by the oppressive societal dictators. While it may be a little heavy-handed, I think this statement is accurate. The novel adresses the problems with society and never provides even a hint at an answer or solution. The end leaves the reader with a bitter, hopeless feeling as our feckless narrator ventures on into his cyclical life.
Even though I struggled through this novel, I do think good things can be taken away from it. The weak plot makes me think that Hunger would be best suited for a classroom in which students would have a syllabus dictating a reading schedule. The psychological exploration within the novel would be great for classroom discussion and could lead to some excellent papers.
