One And The Same

‘Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions’ by James Wood is discussion of Knut Hamsun’s writing style as well as his private life. In many ways, the author’s life is represented in his novels. It says that Knut Hamsun was a lot like the protagonist in Hunger, meaning that he had sudden mood changes. He was someone that lived on his own, excluded from the rest of the world. Even his wife wasn’t close to him. He went through a phase of hunger, where he was poor and didn’t have enough to eat. As a child, Knut Hamsun was abused and beaten by his uncle, and at one point he even tried to cut his leg of with an axe. We can see the similarities to the book Hunger, where the narrator tried to eat his finger.

It seems to me that the life of the great writer Knut Hamsun was rather painful and hard than easy. Imagining going through all the pain that he had to suffer, it is no wonder that he ended his life in 1952. What bothers me about his life is that he turned over to Nazism, even though he supposedly didn’t care about any other people on earth apart from himself. I don’t understand why he would even bother caring about politics then. It’s this unpredictability that Knut Hamsun loved. The article says that when he was staying at a hotel, he would refuse to pay a tip until the last days where he gave enormous tips. Here again there is a similarity to the narrator in Hunger. It is fascinating to see how much resemblance there is between the author and the narrator and to what point their stories are the same.

The main ideas of the text are that all Knut Hamsun’s texts display an amount of Christian perversions. Witnesses say that Knut Hamsun blamed God for his miseries but at the same time he didn’t believe in Him. He said that if God existed, he would curse him. In Hunger, we often see that whenever something goes wrong or disappoints him, he blames God. Then again, he says that God doesn’t exist. I see a contradiction in these statements and they confuse me. As a child, Knut Hamsun’s family was very religious, maybe that’s what shaped his strong negative feelings towards religion and God.

Another idea in the text is that the narrator of Hunger practically IS Knut Hamsun. I must say that there are connections that can be drawn that are significant, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’re the same. It seems to me as though the author knows that some of the narrator’s actions are somewhat crazy, especially in the end. If it is true that Knut Hamsun was such an unstable person himself, it baffles me that he would make his narrator look crazy even though he’s acting the same way he is.