LAST CHAPTER

"Yes, we are vagabonds on the earth. We wander the roads and howl, sometimes we crawl, sometimes we walk upright and trample each other down. Like Daniel, he trampled down and was himself trampled down."

1923

The action in The Last Chapter (1923) is set in the Torahus sanatorium, where the patients mostly have civilization-related ailments.

The novel has a set of central characters, but lacks a clear protagonist. One of the characters is "The Suicide", who after experiencing his wife's infidelity flees to the sanatorium and constantly threatens to take his own life. Another of the guests is the beautiful Julie d'Espard. She begins a relationship with the false Count Flemming and becomes pregnant. When Flemming disappears one day, she turns to Daniel Utby, a farmer on a farm near Torahus and the bearer of the novel's ideological norm.

The Last Chapter is one of Hamsun's darkest novels, written during a period when the thought of death preoccupied him. It is often compared to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain , which was published the following year.

"The thing is, you have not yet discovered your own uselessness, your own superfluity here on earth."

"Yes, we are vagabonds on earth. We wander the roads and howl, sometimes we crawl, sometimes we walk upright and trample each other down." »

"Oh no, you shouldn't pretend to be too nice to put up with life!"