Hunger: Technique and Urban Alienation Anonymous College

Sult, written by Knut Hamsun, is a story that brutally illustrates the effect that one man’s hunger has on his life and work. Often referred to as “one of the great novels of urban alienation" (Heller 29), Hamsun takes a natural condition, hunger, and turns it into a tormenting force that plagues his main character day and night. Erich Heller asks, “Is there anything more everyday and more common than the need for food? Eating is one of the few elements of the everyday shared by all individuals” (27). Sult takes a series of literary devices to develop and give depth to a man’s hunger, the plight and plot of the story.

Sult is a story centered on a nameless man that wanders hungry. In fact, the tale begins, “all of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiana” (Sult 3). The plot consists of a journey that takes the reader between the narrator’s highs and lows, his alternative periods of starvation and rare fullness. The man, a writer, wanders penniless, sharing his experiences as they happen. True to any realist, aesthetic novel, “the action—or what in more conventional novels be the action—takes place entirely within the mind of the story’s protagonist and narrator” (Heller 29). From his initial destitution,...