Resumo de Hunger - Knur Hamsun

Knut Hamsun's disquieting, introverted novel Hunger is the story of an unnamed writer living in raw and self-imposed poverty in Norway in 1890. The story opens with the narrator living in a tiny attic apartment in a boardinghouse . He is forced to pawn one after another of his possessions in order to pay rent. He occasionally earns a little money by selling an article to the newspaper, but soon, with the rent overdue, he leaves the boardinghouse to live on the street.

From this point on, he will never be assured of a place to sleep or a quiet place to write. He will write on park benches, sleep in jail, on the street, in the woods and in a shack. His mood ebbs and flows throughout each day, and he is never stable in his emotions or his thinking. His poverty is such that he chews on sticks and rocks, and eats the pockets out of his coat. His hunger even gets to the point where he literally begins to consume himself. In one scene he takes a bite out of his finger. In another he swallows his own saliva.
Aside from his own compulsions, there is little to structure his daily life. He starves, he denounces God, he wanders the streets alienating strangers, he talks to himself, he praises God, he writes, he yodels, he questions his sanity, has fantasies about women and roast beef, he finds something to eat, he eats it and then vomits it back up, he gives his money away, he pauses to consider whether he should live or die, he laughs, he cries, he goes to bed.

But then, one day, he meets a woman, and for the first time in the novel, there is the possibility of human connection. But of course, the feeling doesn't last, and the famine continues.
The narrator might remind readers of some of literature's other destitute writers--Charles. Dickens' Nemo from Bleak House, Jack London's Martin Eden, and Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout--yet he is still more strange and more miserable than any of these characters. Modern psychology perhaps has given us a few tidy categories to sum up our narrator. He struggles with impulse control, suffers from bipolar disorder and slides into one manic episode after another. He is a pathological liar, has panic attacks and hypergraphia. But in the end, the whole of him is more terrifying and human than his diagnosis. The narrator resists categorization, partly because he has obliterated his old personality through fasting. He is starving, he is not himself anymore. What he's left with is something new and uncontrollable. An impulse , an intensity, an aesthetic.
He might even be an artist. But if he is, then he isn't an artist who is interested in leaving his mark on the world. Instead, he is much more interested in the mark the world will leave on him.

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