The book is without beginning and end and without a plot, but it has a series of climaxes. Each section describes some phase of hunger and its attendant sufferings: the physical deterioration and weakness, the rebellion of spirit, the hallucinations, the shame and degradation. When the strain becomes intolerable, the tension suddenly snaps with the receipt of five or ten kroner, and then Hamsun instantly removes his hero from our sight. We never see him in the enjoyment of this comparative opulence, but when the money is gone, we meet him again beginning the old struggle, though each time weaker and more unfit to take up the fight. He never achieves anything; his small successes in occasionally selling a manuscript never lead to anything. The book is a record of defeat and frustration which have at last become inevitable because something in himself has given way. Even his strange love affair with the girl whom he calls Ylajali ends in baffled disappointment.
Finally Hamsun simply cuts the thread of the story by letting his hero ship as an ordinary seaman in a boat that is going to England. He leaves the city he had set out to conquer. The city has conquered him. "Out in the fjord I straightened up once and, drenched with fever and weakness, looked in toward land and said good-bye for this time to the city of Christiania, where the windows shone so brightly in all the homes."
THE POET
HIS OWN HERO
The most adequate idea of Hamsun's artistic personality can be gained by reading his early works from "Hunger" to "Munken Vendt" and preferably reading them in the order of their appearance.
Through the medley of characters there emerges a distinct type that can be traced in one after the other of his early books but disappears in the later, more objective, pictures of whole communities. This person is at first always the hero in whom everything centres; later he steps into the background as an onlooker who is sometimes the author's spokesman. He is always a dreamer and one who stands outside of organized society; but this aloofness is not self-sought. On the contrary, he often suffers in his loneliness, and is longing and struggling to come within the circle of human fellowship, but there is something in his own nature which unfits him to be a cog in the common machinery. His pulses are differently attuned from those of other people. The standards by which happiness and success are usually measured mean nothing to him, but he can be lifted to exaltation by the fragrance of a flower or the humming of an insect. He is often a poet, if not in actual production at least in his temperament, and has the poet's responsiveness to things that more thick-skinned people do not notice. An ugly face, a jarring noise can shiver his highest mood like crystal and plunge him to the depths of despair. A sour look or an unkind word or even a trifling mishap—the loss of a lead pencil when he is inspired to write—can cast a gloom over his day. He is full of generous impulses which sometimes take erratic forms and is capable of carrying self-sacrifice to the most senseless extreme, but his nature has never a drop of meanness. He revels in communing with nature and finds pleasure in the society of some lowly friend or simple, loving woman, but any happiness that life may bring him is never more than a momentary gleam. He never lives to his full potentiality either in achievement or in passion. The Swedish critic John Landquist puts the question why we never tire of this oft-repeated Hamsun hero any more than of his Swedish cousin Gösta Berling, and answers that it is because he never gains anything and never turns any situation to his own advantage.
There is no doubt that this constantly recurring figure is Hamsun himself in one incarnation after another. He has pointed the connection by personal description, by reference to his authorship, and once even by the use of his own name. He has to a greater extent than most creative artists drawn for his subjects on his own varied experiences, and though he has of course transmuted them in his imagination, it is clear that he has at least been near enough to the events he records to have lived through them very intensely in his own mind. This is, of course, notably true of "Hunger," which was written at the age of thirty, when his own experiences as a journalistic free lance in Christiania were still fresh in his mind. It is true also of "Mysteries," "Pan," and "Victoria," each one of which corresponds to some phase in his own development. In "Munken Vendt" and "Wanderers" there are reminiscences from his vagabond days, and it is significant of the subjectivity with which he enters into the person of his hero that in the latter he has chosen to make the narrator a man of his own age at the time of writing rather than reincarnate himself in the image of his youth. In the earlier books, on the other hand, the hero is always young, generally between twenty-five [and] thirty.