Acne scar, transient, alcoholic; These are a few words that describe Charles Bukowski. Born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Germany on August 16, 1920, his parents moved from Germany to California when Bukowski was young, where they settled. He grew up and went to school. Growing up, Bukowski was teased at school because of his German accent and at home he received beatings from his father about three times a week with a leather bracelet for the slightest offense when he was between 6 and 11 years. he had no luck with women because he suffered from terrible acne. This led to his characteristic face. Bukowski reportedly said that feeling this unwarranted pain made for better material. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why violent video games should not be banned'? Get the original essay When he reached the age of thirteen, he was introduced to alcohol by a friend, which triggered a lifelong relationship with the substance, which led him to the alcoholism that he was known for (Poetry Foundation). This would become a constant theme in his writings. While he was first published at the age of 24, Bukowski struggled to become a writer and gave up while drifting across the country in an inebriated state. Ten years later, at the age of 35, he found himself in Los Angeles and near death from a bleeding ulcer. Bukowski began writing again. He was published in underground newspapers, but became known largely through word of mouth, although much of his popularity came from his writing for a weekly and other underground sources. He eventually had a relatively successful writing career, and at the time of his death, Bukowski was earning approximately $1,000,000.00 per year. By the time Bukowski succumbed to leukemia in 1994, he had written 5,300 poems and stories. He died at the age of 74. Bukowski often wrote in his letters of his desire to read anything that matched the raw intensity of his life experiences, and he sought to express the absurdity of his troubled life through his writing. Bukowski's poetry and prose communicated a simple, sometimes crude and cynical literary aesthetic that replaced beauty with a hardened realism that not only provided thematic and stylistic direction in his writing, but ultimately impacted the direction his writing took. own life. Bukowski wrote about his own life in stories and poems so that he and his readers could better understand the nature of his alternative views on mainstream American society and the creative profession. Such opinions explain his constant quest for freedom and his awareness of the absurdity of the world. Bukowski also sought to communicate that he himself had "felt the flame", having struggled for much of his life to come to terms with daily life in postwar American society. He began describing his experiences in a harsh, uncompromising tone in order to get angry at “soft and false” writing. Bukowski decided early on that his various experiences growing up during the Depression years, working in factories, drinking in bars and sleeping in rooming houses, would be a suitable subject for his poetry and prose. These experiences, when transformed into fiction, would negate the gentle falsification of the literary canon as Bukowski perceived it, as well as the collective submission of mainstream American society to accept cultural mediocrity. Bukowski hoped that his writings would inspire his readers to identify with his alternative worldview. Bukowski's autobiographical fiction openedliterary possibilities to transform ordinary life into a literary form that is both captivating and entertaining. A recurring theme in much of Bukowski's writing is the struggle of an ordinary individual to overcome his suffering in a world he finds absurd. The nature of this struggle is revealed through several recurring characteristics which explain the unusual nature of its particular aesthetic. Bukowski's history of non-commercial publishing, emphasis on writing autobiographical fiction, development of a distinctive character in writing, consistent expression of a view of the world as absurd, l The deliberate avoidance of literary complexity in writing, the appearance of the literary grotesque, the recurring emphasis on drink and sex, Bukowski's obsession with non-conformism and the clarification of the creative act constitute the Bukowski's aesthetic as manifested in each of the five autobiographical novels and in a number of short stories. Such an aesthetic justifies Bukowski's reputation as an author of alternative literature which, in an often crude and confrontational manner, recounts a central character's quest for freedom. Bukowski wrote several hundred poems throughout his career. A considerable number of them express simple, but forcefully stated, sentiments regarding the narrator's awareness of what it means to be free. We will discuss some poems relevant to our discussion. Bukowski's poetry thematically mirrors his prose in terms of his alternative worldview, but it is expressed even more directly than in novels and short stories. We learn something of the nature of this vision in the poem “Nirvana,” in which Bukowski speaks of a small daily pleasure. In this poem, Bukowski depicts an aimless young man traveling on a bus across North Carolina and introduces a small event that ultimately makes the journey more bearable. After stopping at a cafe, Bukowski writes: the waitress was different from the women he had known. She was unaffected, there was a natural humor that came from her. The fry cook was saying crazy things. through the windows. He wanted to stay in this cafe forever. Here, the narrator draws some comfort from the simple ordinariness of his surroundings. We are told at the beginning of the poem that the narrator was a “young man/taking a bus/through North Carolina.” After dropping out of college in 1941, Bukowski escaped the violence of the family home and traveled across America, drinking in bars and sleeping in rooming houses – this part of his life is recounted in the novel Factotum. Although we are not told that the narrator is traveling to escape past trauma, we learn something of his current state of mind in lines such as "he wanted to stay in that cafe forever." The narrator wants to stay at the café because he feels safe there. It's a sentiment repeated later in the poem when Bukowski writes, "the young man thought/I'll ​​just sit here/I'll ​​just stay here." » The narrator nevertheless resumes his journey on the bus, but the coffee experience seems to have resonated in him and in him alone, since he distinguishes himself from his traveling companions by noting: “they had not/noticed/the /magic”. This poem is not atypical of Bukowski's poetry in general which often makes very simple observations or introduces everyday motifs. Although the narrator did not necessarily have a transformative experience in the poem, he felt a moment of calm in an otherwise hectic life. It is significant that a moment of “magic” was generated from a set of ordinary routines. We can imagine that if daydreamingof the narrator had been disturbed, Bukowski's typically cynical and jaded voice would have burst in. Nevertheless, the narrator was able to derive a certain satisfaction from his solitude which tells us a lot about the nature of Bukowski's art in general, particularly with regard to the explanation of the motivation behind such a statement in the poem "The genius of the crowd” in which Bukowski warns his readers: Beware of the average man The average woman... Not wanting solitude Not understanding solitude They will try to destroy everything that differs from theirs. The reasons for Bukowski's social alienation are explained in more detail in the opening stanza of the poem: There is enough betrayal, hatred, violence and absurdity in the average human being to supply a given army at a given moment. This poem expresses the idea that the genius of the average man and woman lies in a suggested human capacity to destroy. or isolate everything that expresses a convinced individualism, distinct from the conformism of the masses. While the narrator of "Nirvana" takes pleasure in observing ordinary life, in "Genius of the Crowd" the narrator distinguishes between what might be interpreted as antisocial tendencies in an individual personality and what he perceives as the absurdity of the “average man and woman”. This perspective comes from someone whose experiences have led to some unpleasant conclusions about society in general, such as the following: Not being able to love fully They will believe your love is incomplete AND THEN THEY WILL HATE YOU. These experiences, which are also revealed in many other poems, stories and novels, allow the reader to think about the type of individual who would make such aggressive remarks. Bukowski provides some clues in the opening lines of the poem "A Wild, Cool Wind That Blows...", in which Bukowski writes: "I shouldn't have blamed my father alone, but/he was the first to introduce me / raw and stupid hatred. The narrator then goes on to explain that he was shocked to discover that his father was just one of many people he met throughout his life who were, similarly, misanthropes: for when I left this...house...I found its counterparts everywhere. : My father was only a small part of the whole, even though he was the best hate-monger I've ever met. But others were also very good at it. Bukowski, however, does not simply air his grievances without proposing a possible course of action. this will potentially ease the suffering of its narrator. So, he concludes the poem with these lines: my only freedom, my only peace, is when I'm away from them, when I'm somewhere else, it doesn't matter where - an old fat waitress bringing me a cup of coffee is in comparison like a fresh and wild wind. blow. This is a feeling also expressed in the poem “Nirvana”. Bukowski recognizes in both poems that there is something vital in the ordinary behavior of the cafe staff and the "fat waitress who brings me a cup of coffee", which he recognizes as a simple human act devoid of cruelty. Bukowski also implies that true freedom will only come to those who are willing to make the effort to seek it. In this regard, Jean-François Duval notes that Buk [Bukowski] was a man obliged to come to terms with reality and to get his hands dirty. A nonconformist who, all his life, tried to choose freedom and accept its contradictions and its darkness. In short, a man who, to use Sartre's terminology, could not be classified among the “bastards”. According to this interpretation, Bukowski's poetry and prose thus constitute a provocative act of self-affirmation, recognized in the.