Drowning in Silence: Intoxication as a Masculine Response to Emotional Repression and Social Expectation

Abstract

This study reads Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) as a psychological anatomy of masculine repression and its corrosive impact on emotion, identity, and love. Through the unnamed narrator’s hunger, delusions, and failed intimacy, Hamsun portrays a man crushed by the social demand to appear strong, rational, and self-sufficient. The narrator’s physical starvation becomes the external symptom of an inner famine—the emotional emptiness produced by silence. Drawing on Cleary (2022) on emotional constraint and father–son detachment, Liaqat et al. (2020) on normative male alexithymia, and Ahmmed and Khan (2024) on the sociocultural training of endurance, the thesis argues that Hamsun’s protagonist embodies the long-term psychological cost of hegemonic masculinity. Unable to name or share feeling, he converts emotion into bodily sensation hunger, dizziness, nausea until pain replaces language. His longing for Ylajali, defined by oscillations between tenderness and withdrawal, reveals how repression destroys the possibility of love: affection becomes another arena for control, vulnerability a threat to pride. His “intoxication” through starvation and delirium thus serves both as metaphor and symptom of breakdown. Situating Hunger within modernist and psychological frameworks, the study shows how masculine stoicism, when internalized, mutates into alienation, hallucination, and emotional paralysis. Ultimately, Hamsun anticipates modern psychology’s findings on men’s silence, exposing how the performance of strength isolates the self and makes even love impossible.