Acne-scarred, transient, alcoholic; These are some 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, and he grew up and went to school. Growing up, Bukowski was teased at school for his German accent and at home, when he was between the ages of 6 and 11, he was beaten about three times a week by his father with a leather belt for the slightest offense. he had no luck with women because he suffered from terrible acne. This led to his distinctive face. Bukowski famously said that experiencing this unwarranted pain resulted in better material. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original EssayWhen he reached the tender age of thirteen, he was introduced to alcohol by a friend which sparked a lifelong relationship with the substance leading to the alcoholism he was famous for (Poetry Foundation). This would become a constant theme in his writing. Although first published at 24, Bukowski struggled to become a writer and gave up while wandering the country in a drunken stupor. Ten years later, at age 35, he found himself in Los Angeles and near death from a bleeding ulcer. Bukowski began writing again. It was published in underground newspapers but became known largely through word of mouth, although much of its popularity came from writing for a weekly newspaper 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 dollars a year. When Bukowski died of leukemia in 1994, he had written 5,300 poems and short stories. He died at the age of 74. Bukowski often wrote in letters of his desire to read anything that matched the raw intensity of his life experiences and tried to express the absurdity of his troubled life through his writing. Bukowski's poetry and prose communicated a simple, sometimes crass and cynical literary aesthetic that replaced beauty with a hardened realism that not only provided a thematic and stylistic focus in his writing but ultimately influenced the direction his writing took. life. Bukowski wrote about his life in short stories and poems so that both himself and his readers could better understand the nature of his alternative views of both mainstream American society and the creative profession. Such views explain his lifelong search for freedom and awareness of the absurdity of the world. Bukowski also sought to convey that he himself had "felt the flame", having struggled for much of his life to come to terms with daily life in post-war American society. He began to portray his experiences in a hardened, uncompromising tone to rage against writing that was "soft and false." Bukowski decided at an early age that his various experiences growing up in the Depression years, working in factories, drinking in bars, and sleeping in boarding houses, would be suitable subject matter for his poetry and prose. These experiences, when transformed into fiction, would deny the soft falsity of the literary canon as Bukowski perceived it, and the collective subjugation of mainstream American society in accepting cultural mediocrity. Bukowski hoped that his writings would stimulate his readers to identify with his alternative vision of the world. Bukowski's autobiographical narrative opened up literary possibilities for transforming one's ordinary life into formliterature that could be both compelling and entertaining. A consistent theme that runs through much of Bukowski's writing is the struggle of an ordinary individual to overcome his suffering in a world that he finds absurd. The nature of this struggle is revealed through several recurring characteristics that provide an explanation for the unusual nature of its particular aesthetic. Bukowski's non-commercial publishing history, his emphasis on writing autobiographical fiction, the development of a distinctive personality in writing, the coherent expression of an absurdist worldview, the deliberate avoidance of literary complexity in writing, the appearance of the literary grotesque, the recurring emphasis on drinking and sex, Bukowski's obsession with nonconformity and the clarification of the creative act constitute Bukowski's aesthetic as manifested in each of the five autobiographical novels and in a good number of stories. This aesthetic justifies Bukowski's reputation as the author of an alternative literature that, in an often crude and conflictual way, records a central character's search for freedom. Bukowski wrote many hundreds of poems over the course of his career. A considerable number of these express simple, but powerfully expressed, feelings regarding the narrator's awareness of what it means to be free. We will discuss a couple of poems relevant to our discussion. Bukowski's poetry thematically mirrors his prose in terms of an alternative worldview, but is expressed even more directly than in novels and short stories. We learn something about the nature of this vision in the poem “Nirvana,” in which Bukowski writes about a small, everyday pleasure. In this poem, Bukowski portrays an aimless young man traveling on a bus through North Carolina and introduces a small event that ultimately makes the journey more bearable. After stopping at a bar, Bukowski writes: The waitress was different from the women he had met. she wasn't affected, there was a natural humor coming from her. the cook said crazy things. the dishwasher in the back was laughing, a nice, clean, pleasant laugh. the young man looked at the snow through the windows. He wanted to stay in that cafe forever. Here, the narrator takes some comfort in the sheer banality of his surroundings. At the beginning of the poem we are told that the narrator was a “young man/traveling by bus/going through North Carolina.” After dropping out of college in 1941, Bukowski fled the violence of his family home and began traveling around America, drinking in bars and sleeping in boarding houses: this part of his life is chronicled in the novel Factotum. Although we are not told that the narrator is traveling to escape a past trauma, we learn something about his current state of mind in lines like "he wanted to stay in that bar forever." The narrator wants to stay in the bar because he feels safe there. This is a sentiment repeated further in the poem when Bukowski writes, “the young man thought/ I will sit here/ I will stay here.” The narrator resumes his journey on the bus anyway, but the experience in the bar has seemingly resonated with him and him alone, as he distinguishes himself from his fellow passengers by noting, “they hadn't / 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 what would otherwise be a restless life. Significantly, a moment of “magic” was generated from a set of ordinary routines. One can imagine that if the narrator's reveries were disturbed, the voicetypically cynical and tired of Bukowski she would have interjected. However, the narrator managed to derive some satisfaction from his solitude, which tells us a lot about the nature of Bukowski's art in general, especially to explain the motivation behind such a statement in the poem "The Genius of the Crowd" in which Bukowski puts warns his readers:Beware the average manThe average woman...They don't want lonelinessThey don't understand lonelinessThey try to destroy Everything that differs from theirs.The reasons for Bukowski's social alienation are further explained in the poem's opening stanza:There that's enough betrayal, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average human being to supply a given army on a given day. This poem expresses the view that the genius of the common man and woman lies in a suggested human capacity to destroy or isolate everything that expresses staunch individualism, as distinct from the conformism of the masses. While in “Nirvana” the narrator takes pleasure in observing ordinary life, in “Genius of the Crowd” the narrator distinguishes between what could be interpreted as antisocial tendencies in an individual personality and what he perceives as the absurdity of man and average 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 that 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 reflect on the type of individual who would make such aggressive comments. Bukowski provides some clues in the first lines of the poem “a wild and fresh wind blowing…”, in which Bukowski writes: “I shouldn't have blamed only my father, but/ he was the first to introduce me/ crude and stupid hatred ”. The narrator then goes on to explain that he was distressed to discover that his father was just one of the many people he had met throughout his life who were, similarly, misanthropic: because when I left that... house... I found the its counterpart everywhere. : My father was only a small part of the whole, even though he was the best at hate I'd ever met. But others were also very good at this. Bukowski, however, does not simply air his grievances without offering a possible course of action that will potentially ease his narrator's suffering. He then concludes the poem with the lines: My only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from them, when I am elsewhere, no matter where - a fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee is in comparison like a fresh wind and wild. blowing. This is a sentiment also expressed in the poem “Nirvana”. Bukowski recognizes in both poems that there is something positive in the ordinary behavior of both the bar staff and the "fat waitress who brings me a cup of coffee", which he recognizes as a simple human act free of cruelty. Bukowski also suggests that true freedom will only come to those who are willing to make the effort to seek it. In this regard, Jean-Francois Duval notes that Buk [Bukowski] was a man forced to endure reality and get his hands dirty. A nonconformist who throughout his life tried to choose freedom and deal with 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 therefore constitute an act of defiant self-affirmation, recognized in the concluding lines of his poem "Cornered": now lighting new cigarettes pouring more drinks was quite a struggle it still is. This challenge is also found in the poem “ Trollius and.