Chinaski

Chinaski

Henry Charles "Hank" Chinaski is the literary alter ego of the American writer Charles Bukowski, appearing in five of Bukowski's novels, a number of his short stories and poems, and the films Barfly and Factotum. Although much of Chinaski's biography is based on Bukowski's own life story, the Chinaski character is still a literary creation that is constructed with the veneer of what the writer Adam Kirsch calls "a pulp fiction hero." Works of fiction that feature the character include Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With the Beasts (1965), Post Office (1971), South of No North (1973), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), Hot Water Music (1983), Hollywood (1989), and Septuagenarian Stew (1990). He is also mentioned briefly in the beginning of Bukowski's last novel, Pulp (1994). Chinaski is a writer who worked for years as a mail carrier. An alcoholic, womanizing misanthrope, he serves as both the protagonist and antihero of the novels in which he appears, which span from his poverty-stricken childhood to his middle age, in which he finds some small success as a screenwriter. Some of the features of the Chinaskian persona: excessive alcohol consumption; love of art (classical music, literature); solitude and self-isolation; volatile relationships (especially with women); self-effacement; nihilism; and the violation of societal norms.

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