Hunger

An unnamed young man wanders the streets of Christiania — the old name for Oslo — without money, without a settled room, and very often without food. He is a would-be writer, proud past all reason, who would sooner collapse in the gutter than admit he has not eaten. He pawns his clothes piece by piece, gives away the little he scrapes together in sudden fits of pride or pity, chases a woman he names Ylajali through a few charged encounters, and starves. There is, in the ordinary sense, almost no plot — and that is the point. Hunger is the record of what hunger does to a mind.

Knut Hamsun threw out the machinery of the realist novel — the social panorama, the crowd of characters, the steady march of incident — and locked the reader inside a single skull. We follow the young man's thoughts hour by hour as they race, double back, soar into grandiosity, and crash into shame, all within the space of an afternoon. Because the mind is starving, it is unreliable in the deepest way: he hallucinates, invents, argues with himself, and we are given no steadier vantage from which to correct him. The result is one of the first sustained pieces of what would come to be called stream of consciousness.

Published in 1890, Hunger has been called the literary opening of the twentieth century. Its method — radical interiority, the famished and untrustworthy narrator, the refusal of plot — ran straight into the work of Kafka, the modernists, and the existentialists; Isaac Bashevis Singer traced the whole modern school of fiction back to Hamsun's example. Beneath its spare events runs a disturbing argument about pride, art, and the irrational self — about a will that would rather destroy itself than be reduced to its appetites.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by George Egerton, paired with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition, method, and place in the birth of modern fiction, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.