The other Hunger Games: Knut Hamsun's weird novel

"Hunger" Weird. What a downer - something so relentlessly glum about European existentialist fiction - which I guess this is - Knut Hamsun, as noted yesterday, a descendant of Dostoyevsky and a precursor to Camus, Sartre, maybe Beckett (Samuel, not Josh). The existential qualities seem to me to be that this novel exists entirely in the moment of its occurrence - there (at least through the first half) not a moment of back story, we know nothing about the history of the narrator, I'm not sure we know his name, although he has assumed several names as part of his delirium - he just is. In the present, he is in dire poverty, suffering on and off from symptoms of starvation, dehydration, and malnutrition. He also had some serious psychological malady - probably a form of bipolar disorder, as he oscillates between manic bouts of composition (he is a writer with some minor credentials - sells small pieces to local newspapers to keep from utter starvation, but as the novel moves along it appears he has alienated his potential editors through his odd and demanding behavior). In part 2 of the novel he has given up his small apartment and moves into an abandoned tinsmith's shot where he is living rent-free; he continues his erratic behavior and is somewhat voluntarily locked up in a police cell, which gets him out of the rain but puts him through a night of utter darkness, which he finds terrifying. I am not at this point sure of the significance of all of his suffering: what is he truly "hungry" for? Spiritual salvation? Social acceptance? Love of some sort (though there are no references to any other human relation, amorous sexual or otherwise)? Family? Fame and success? It is one of the oddest chronicles - from what little I know of Hamsun I believe he became a Nazi sympathizer, and I'm looking to see how Hunger could have a shadow of Fascism - and I don't see it, unless it's an early indication of the author's own delusions and instability. I will keep pursuing this thought through the second half of the novel.