The Doctor is worried about him, and for good reason. He sees things, including the god Pan in the forest, he finds himself stranded in fog and ends up in the exact opposite place he intended, sometimes he feels things that aren't there, he flies into a rage for little reason, and he seems to oscillate between some level of social competence (even claiming great insight into the human mind) and total inability to understand what's going on in social situations. It's in general hard to get a handle on this short work, as the text quickly makes clear that Glahn isn't mentally stable, and therefore is likely far from a reliable narrator. They're so close that it makes you wonder if (warning: spoiler) Glahn wasn't faking his own death with the letter that comprises the last 20 pages of Pan. This proven ability is what makes Pan such a confusing work to me, since the two narrative voices in the book are supposed to be distinct but read almost identically. One thing these books prove is that Hamsun has range as an author, and isn't one of those writers that can only capture a single type of character. «It was beginning to be no night the sun barely dipped his face into the sea and then came up again, red, refreshed, as if he had been down to drink.Hamsun is an interesting writer: I adore Hunger, and I thought Growth of the Soil was a solid work well deserving of the accolades it received, but Victoria, on the other hand, was completely forgettable. Among scholars of modern times, however, the more common response is to criticise Thomas Glahn’s narrative voice and the poetic nature of his depiction of life. The novel was hailed for the beauty of its descriptions of nature by contemporaries.

Glahn’s account is full of poetic and mystical descriptions of nature and mood.

Yet he cultivates relationships with the village’s most prominent local people, and starts an affair with Edvarda Mack, daughter of the local squire, the trader Mack.Īn epilogue to the novel describes how Thomas Glahn died while hunting in India. He lives a simple, isolated life in his cabin, in apparent harmony with nature. It is 1855, and Glahn survives on what he is able to hunt and fish. In Pan (1894) the young Lieutenant Thomas Glahn relates the story of what happened to him at Sirilund, a trading post in Nordland.

Pan knut