THE LAST JOY

"Now I have gone into the woods. Not for that, I am not offended by anything or particularly hurt by the wickedness of men; but when the woods do not come to me I must go to them. That is how it is. This time I have not gone out as a slave and a vagabond. I am rich and overfed, drowsy with prosperity, with luck, do you understand? I left the world like a sultan leaves fat food and harem and flowers and puts on his hair shirt. I could probably also make something more important of it. Because I will go here and think and make big irons red. Nietzsche would probably have said something like this: The last word I said to men was justified, men nodded. But this was my last word, I went into the woods. Because then I understood that I had either said something dishonest or something stupid... I did not speak in that direction, but simply went into the woods."

"I will weaken the night by shouting against it, otherwise it will mysteriously take all my strength and make me willless."

"To retreat and sit in the solitude of the forest and have it nice and dark around me. That is the ultimate joy."

1912

The Last Joy (1912) is the final volume in the Wanderer trilogy and Hamsun's last first-person novel.

The narrator finds himself at Torahus, a guesthouse in the mountains. Here he falls in love with the young teacher Ingeborg Torsen, but the love remains platonic. Ingeborg becomes an image of the new woman, the Torsen type, a professional woman who wastes her life on insignificance. The salvation for Ingeborg Torsen is the meeting with the stout farmer Nikolai and life as a farm wife and mother.

The socially critical tendencies of A Wanderer's Play with a Mute are reinforced, and The Last Joy lacks both the melancholy and lyrical moods of the two previous Wanderer books.