FAMILY

Now one might think that Abel had a dangerously large family right from the start, wife, parents, two sisters and grandmother, it may have been difficult in the first weeks after the wedding, but Abel and the steam hammer worked well, and his father also helped out in the forge, he had the most powerful upper body and was especially a machine for filing. It went really well. (The Women at the Watermill, 1920)

The family constitutes a positive value in Hamsun's writings, and the emblem of a good family life is children. But the family is depicted in several variations, from the well-functioning (Ezra and Hosea in Landstrykere ), the unhappy (the Falkenberg family in Under høststjernen ), the separated (Lovise Magrete and Håkon Doppen in Landstrykere ) and the dissolved (the suicider and his wife in Siste kapittel ) to name a few.

In The Women at the Water Fountain, Hamsun depicts an extraordinary family situation connected to the marriage between the castrate Oliver and the voluptuous Petra, and the question of inheritance and procreation is raised in this connection.

It is also striking that several of Hamsun's main characters either have no origin story or are orphans (including Bjørger, the hero of Hunger , Nagel, Knud Pedersen, Isak and August).