Recommendations
Books Like Hunger
Eight novels of starving consciousness, modernist alienation, and the isolated artist
Hamsun's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece recommends novels that pioneer radically interior narration, explore the artist or intellectual alienated from society, and trace the line from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century modernism.
- 1Buy
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Underground Man's confession — the most direct precursor to Hunger: an unnamed narrator in a northern city, hyperconscious and incapable of normal social relations, examining his own pathology in prose that anticipates the interior monologue; Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground twenty-six years before Hunger and Hamsun knew it; the two novellas are the founding texts of literary alienation
- 2Buy
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Josef K. arrested without charge — Kafka was directly influenced by Hamsun; the condition of the protagonist in The Trial (enmeshed in a system he cannot comprehend, unable to mount an effective defense, increasingly isolated) is an externalization of the condition Hamsun's narrator inhabits internally; where Hunger's crisis is interior and self-inflicted, The Trial's crisis is exterior and imposed, but the resulting alienation is identical
- 3Buy
Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Antoine Roquentin's philosophical crisis in a provincial French town — the existentialist novel most directly in Hunger's tradition; Roquentin's journal entries, written in the first person from inside a deteriorating consciousness, use the diary form that Hamsun also used; the confrontation with the contingency of existence that drives Roquentin's nausea parallels the confrontation with physical reality that Hunger's starvation produces
- 4Buy
Petersburg
by Andrei Bely
Senator Ableukhov and his revolutionary son in pre-revolutionary Petersburg — Bely's 1913 novel is the Russian stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, published twenty years after Hunger; the city as a force that dissolves individual identity, the prose that fragments under psychological pressure, and the figure of the isolated intellectual are all directly traceable to Hamsun's influence on Russian modernism
- 5Buy
Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West
An advice columnist in Depression-era New York is overwhelmed by the suffering of his correspondents — West's compressed, brutal novel shares Hunger's preoccupation with a consciousness being destroyed by its own sensitivity to pain; both protagonists have chosen positions (writer, advice-giver) that expose them to suffering they cannot process; West knew Hamsun and Hunger is visible in Miss Lonelyhearts' interior devastation
- 6Buy
The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes as a giant insect — Kafka's most direct examination of a person excluded from normal social and economic life; where Hunger's narrator is starving because he cannot or will not produce useful work, Gregor is excluded from useful work because he has become useless; both stories are about a person on the margins of the economic system watching that marginality destroy his humanity
- 7Buy
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual, exists between the animal world and the human, unable to belong fully to either — Hesse's novel of alienation is the most widely read twentieth-century novel in the Hunger tradition; where Hamsun's narrator is starving and young, Hesse's is comfortable and aging, but both are defined by their inability to participate in the social world around them
- 8Buy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
Stephen Dedalus's development from childhood to artistic vocation — Joyce's autobiographical novel is the most formally sophisticated treatment of the figure Hamsun introduced: the artist who cannot belong to the world he was born into and must construct his own consciousness as his primary artistic material; where Hunger follows the starvation of that consciousness, Portrait of the Artist follows its formation
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