Knut Hamsun’s Hunger: A Self-Narrative towards a Self-Discovery

In Knut Hamsun’s great novel, Hunger, the unnamed protagonist is a writer living in raw and self-imposed poverty in Norway in the city of Christiania, near Oslo, in 8109. Out of work, he struggles to write articles for the local newspapers to make a little money to feed himself. However, he ends up with no money for rent, and resorts to selling off his meager possessions to the pawn broker one at a time until he has nothing left. After experiencing manic highs and bleak depressions, he finally takes a job on a ship sailing away from Norway, to England, and says goodbye to his native land. Hunger is a self-narrative of a narration, Knut Hamsun’s real life. The novel is clearly a great autobiographical modernist work, by referring to its undated times, and the stream of consciousness technique; still, there are some weak clues, such as its double-narrative quality and its almost fragmented structure, due to some visions, making it seem rather a premier post-modern work. This article aims to explore some parallel propositions of Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger: Repetition, Stream of Consciousness, Time, and Voice as the most noticeable clues and analyses of any narration. In brief, it may be said that the author of this paper intends to read Hunger once more under the light of some of the common conceptions of narratology to confirm its artistic expression.

کلیدواژه ها:

Repetition ، Stream of Consciousness ، Time ، Voice