Resumo de Hunger - Knut Hamsun

Hunger is the last word in finding your self. We?ve all felt the hunger. It is at its most insistent in youth, but is usually driven into the background, absorbed back into the system, as life progresses and the more mundane and bourgeois preoccupations take over, though many artists such as Picasso never disconnect from it even into old age. In Knut Hamsun?s novel we see that drive taken to extremes and starkly exposed in all its rawness.
The young man at the centre of the story has no name. He wanders the streets of Christiania (Oslo) in 1890, deliberately starving himself to the point of death and trying to live by writing. Sometimes he makes a little money, and then gives it away. The hunger is an existential as well as physical condition. There is no story as such, no plot as in most nineteenth century novels. The young man wanders the streets of the city, behaving irrationally, talking to himself, accosting strangers with his rambling talk and fantasies, and worrying about his rent and clothes. At one point he almost becomes insane. He lives literally from hand to mouth and exists in a waking nightmare where the background is a sort of anonymous, frozen hell of labyrinthine streets and dark bed sits, driven always by the gnawing hunger.
I must say that it strongly reminds me of my own wanderings in various cities, when I was alone and friendless and pursuing something that I did not understand. In San Diego, for three months, all I could think about each and every day was where my next meal was coming from and where I was going to sleep that night. Everything else became irrelevant. A part of me separated off and took over in a mechanical way, directing my actions, and I simply obeyed that voice. Mountaineers stranded in the peaks with injuries have experienced this ? something takes over to lead them to safety. Hemingway too seems to be referring to this when he talks of the purity and simplicity of simply doing what you have to do, with no doubts or prevarications. Something within the hero of Hunger is making him starve himself, keeping him constantly on the brink, until he has completed his ?sentence?.
Christiania is a state of mind, and the first sentence of the novel is indicative of this: ?All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania ? that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him?.

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