Our Saviour's Cemetery

Our Saviour's Cemetery is a recurring location in Knut Hamsun's Hunger, serving as a site of refuge, creative struggle, and psychological deterioration for the unnamed protagonist during his wanderings through Christiania. It is one of the few places where the starving writer can sit undisturbed, yet it also becomes a stage for his most acute mental crises, mirroring the city's indifference to his suffering.

Location and Setting

The cemetery is situated in Christiania, the novel's setting, a city from which, as the narrator states, "no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there." The protagonist first visits it on a damp autumn morning, finding a quiet seat on the slope near the Mortuary Chapel. The atmosphere is one of complete quietness, where he dozes in the damp air, muses, half-sleeps, and shivers. The cemetery offers a stark contrast to the bustling streets, providing a space for solitude that is both a comfort and a prison.

Events and the Protagonist's Ordeal

The cemetery is the site of several key episodes. Early in the novel, the protagonist sits there after failing to write, dozing and shivering, only to be jolted into a panic when he realizes time has passed and he must rush to the newspaper office. Later, after a night spent in the woods, he returns to the cemetery, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, finding relief from the "little gnawing in his chest" in this cramped position. It is here that he observes a stone-cutter carving inscriptions, a sight that reminds him of an acquaintance and prompts him to consider pawning his shaving-tickets. The cemetery also becomes a place of despair; after a day of failed attempts to secure food or money, he sits there, dozing with his head on his breast, apathetic and sick with hunger, contemplating death. He even finds a pebble there, which he wipes clean and puts in his mouth to mumble, a desperate act to stave off starvation.

Narrative Significance

The cemetery functions as a spatial metaphor for the protagonist's liminal state between life and death. It is a place of the dead where he, a living man, goes to rest, work, and slowly waste away. The quiet, damp atmosphere of the cemetery amplifies his isolation and the relentless passage of time, which he measures by the clock on Our Saviour's Church. The cemetery's gates, which close at eight o'clock, impose a temporal boundary on his refuge, forcing him back into the hostile city. His repeated returns to this location underscore the cyclical nature of his suffering and the lack of any real escape from his poverty. The cemetery is not merely a backdrop but an active participant in his psychological landscape, a place where the boundary between his own living death and the literal death around him blurs.