Opland Café

The Opland Café appears in Knut Hamsun's Hunger as a place the protagonist turns to in moments of acute need, a fixed point in the city's geography that he associates with the possibility of a small loan or a necessary purchase. It is not a place of comfort or leisure but a functional destination, one among many he visits in his daily struggle to survive. The café's significance lies in how it repeatedly fails to deliver the relief he seeks, reinforcing the pattern of disappointment that defines his existence in Christiania.

A Destination for Desperate Errands

The protagonist first thinks of the Opland Café when he needs a candle to work on an article for the Commandor. He goes there specifically to find his young acquaintance from the bank, hoping to procure a penny for a candle. He passes unhindered through all the rooms, past a dozen tables where men sit chatting, eating, and drinking, and even into the red alcove, but he does not find his man. Crestfallen and annoyed, he drags himself out again into the street, his errand a failure. The café, which he had entered with a specific purpose, yields nothing, and he is left to wander aimlessly, his need for a candle—and the article it would help him finish—unmet.

A Place of Failed Transactions

Earlier in the narrative, the café is also the site where the protagonist waits for the same bank employee, hoping to pawn his shaving tickets and a tie. He walks up and down hard by the café, keeping close to the iron railings and watching all who go in and out. When the young man finally appears, fresh and elegantly dressed, the protagonist's heart flutters like a little bird in his breast. He blurts out his request for sixpence, thrusting the packet of tickets and the tie into the man's hand. The acquaintance turns his purse inside out, claiming he has no money, having been totally cleared out the night before. The protagonist takes his word for it and draws back, his last hope for that day extinguished. The Opland Café, in this instance, becomes the backdrop for a transaction that never happens, a place where his poverty is laid bare and his efforts to barter his few remaining possessions come to nothing.

A Symbol of Unattainable Sustenance

The café's name also surfaces in the protagonist's thoughts as a place of potential, but never actual, relief. When he is at his most desperate, he considers the Opland Café as a place where he might find the bank employee, but the journey there is long and wearisome, and the outcome is always the same. The café represents a kind of promise that the city holds out but never fulfills. It is a location where other people—the men chatting, eating, and drinking—engage in the normal social rituals of life, while the protagonist can only observe from the outside, his hunger and poverty barring him from participation. The Opland Café, like so many other places in Christiania, is a reminder of the world he cannot enter, a fixed point in a geography of exclusion.