Hunger for what?: Knut Hamsun's troubling novel

Hunger for what? It's evident, reading Knut Hamsun's 1920 novel, "Hunger," that the narrator, a lonely existential anti-hero existing in dire poverty on tiny payments he receives from various newspaper editors who seem to buy his pieces more or less as an act of charity - he is clearly suffering some mental disorder and his essays, which we don't see but which he describes, are obviously either incoherent rantings or completely unsuited for general-readership publication - the man - unnamed - is always on the verge of actual starvation, which drives him to some frantic behavior and at times to delusion. At one point in part 3 when has not eaten for days and goes out in the night to buy a candle so that he can continue to write in the tinsmith's shop where he's been living "off the grid," he gets too much change for the storekeeper (perhaps an intentional act of pity? if so, narrator does not realize this) - he's tormented by guilt for taking the ore/coins - but goes out and buys a roast-beef sandwich, which he vomits - ultimately atones by giving the remaining coins to a street vendor - when he needs them far more than she does, it would seem. Oddly, a woman whom he had earlier stalked through the city is fascinated by him, hangs around in front of his little shack, eventually allows him to walk her home - they kiss - is he actually on the verge of a human relationship? No doubt he will destroy this possibility (he has a weird name for her, something like Yilyali - he's prone to making of monstrous words that sound like creatures from a Lovecraft novel) - so what is he hungry for? Salvation? Redemption? Atonement? As noted yesterday, he is a purely existential character and we know nothing of his background except for a hint that he has worked aboard ships. It would be easy, probably too easy, to seem him as a Christ figure: the city he's in is Christiania, he is suffering - for the sins of others? - but is he really a holy figure in any way or a prophet? Does he do anything for the betterment of others? His hunger may be a metaphor for his emptiness - and the emptiness of life, in Hamsun's view, in 20th-century Europe - the narrator is literally empty of content and he can only be "saved" by finding something in his world for consumption - but when he does, he vomits it out - the world is insufficient to sustain him. He's in this way the opposite of the Underground Man: he's not beneath the world, he's outside of it, above it all. Note: I have since learned that the publication date for Hunger is 1890; 1920 is I think its English-language pub date. Makes Hunger even more of precursor than I'd thought.