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Hunger (Sult, 1890) by Knut Hamsun is one of the founding texts of European literary modernism — a Norwegian novel, written in the first person, about an unnamed young writer in Christiania (Oslo) who is starving and who refuses, for reasons he himself cannot entirely articulate, to solve his poverty by compromising his pride or seeking regular work. The novel has no conventional plot and very little external event — its subject is the interior of a consciousness under extreme deprivation, the strange and irrational thoughts that hunger produces, the relationship between physical need and mental experience, and the gap between the self the protagonist presents to the world and the self he actually inhabits. Hamsun's influence on twentieth-century literature was enormous and direct: Kafka, Beckett, Bukowski, Paul Auster, and many others have acknowledged the novel as a founding influence. The Nobel Committee cited Hunger among the works that justified giving Hamsun the Nobel Prize in 1920.
Where to start
Hunger (1890)
Complete Hunger Book List
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Hunger
Knut Hamsun·1890
Hunger — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the narrator in Hunger refuse to solve his poverty?
The narrator of Hunger does not refuse to solve his poverty in any simple, explicable way — the novel's power comes from the fact that his reasons are obscure even to himself. He has pride: he is a writer who believes in his work, and accepting charity or regular employment would require a kind of self-abasement that he cannot accept. He has paranoid and irrational thoughts produced by hunger that distort his perception and his judgment. He makes incomprehensible decisions (giving away the small amounts of money he does acquire) that seem to be driven by a need to maintain some obscure sense of self that regular employment would threaten. The novel presents this psychology without explaining or judging it, leaving the reader to inhabit the narrator's consciousness without the comfort of understanding it from outside.
What is Hamsun's influence on later writers?
Hamsun's influence is vast and specific. Kafka acknowledged Hunger as an influence on the Kafkaesque atmosphere of isolation and inexplicable circumstance. Beckett's Molloy and the later novels owe a significant debt to Hunger's first-person unreliable narration and its focus on consciousness rather than event. Bukowski's autobiographical novels (Post Office, Factotum) are the American working-class successors to Hunger's literary-bohemian poverty. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (particularly City of Glass) is a direct homage. Isaac Bashevis Singer identified Hunger as a founding influence on modern Yiddish literature. In Norway, Hamsun was the defining influence on twentieth-century Norwegian prose, though his politics (he was a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation) have complicated his legacy.
What else did Hamsun write?
Hamsun's other major novels include Pan (1894), a lyrical novel about a hunter's love affair in northern Norway; Victoria (1898), a short love story; Growth of the Soil (1917), a vast pastoral novel about a farmer building a life on unpopulated land in northern Norway, which won him the Nobel Prize; and the August Trilogy (1927-33). His range is wide — from the modernist interiority of Hunger to the almost mythological pastoral of Growth of the Soil — but the Norwegian landscape, the conflict between modern life and natural life, and the psychology of proud, solitary individuals run through everything he wrote.
Is Hunger autobiographical?
Substantially yes — Hamsun lived in poverty in Christiania in the 1880s, worked various manual jobs, and struggled to establish himself as a writer before the success of Hunger. The specific events of the novel are not strictly autobiographical, but the conditions of poverty and isolation, the literary ambition, and the relationship with a city that seems simultaneously hostile and indifferent are drawn directly from his experience. Hamsun's lectures on American literature (he had spent time in America working as a farmhand and streetcar conductor) caused a sensation in Christiania in 1891 and established him as a literary figure, but Hunger, published a year earlier, was the work that made his reputation.
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