In this article, the author explicitly states that things like e-mail and twitter have become too prominent of things in our lives. Philosopher Blaine Pascal stated “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” I can relate to this immensely, and things as easily available as e-mail and other web based things just catalyze off-tasking. The author also states that we’re seeking some consolation, asylum or easy pleasure.” The internet is that in a nutshell. The reason people search for distractions is because things like pain and boredom are sometimes too much to bear. Rather, it is easier to find a distraction than confront what we do not want to. There are many examples of these distractions in Hunger by Knut Hamsun.
Throughout the book, the protagonist goes off into seemingly harmless tangents of deranged thought that actually begin to consume him. What started out as an innocent whim turns into a fully fledged fact that he cannot get out of his head. His capriciousness hinders him from staying on task. Examples of this also happen when he is trying to write. Although he knows that his life and getting food depends on him writing a good story and getting them published, he finds himself distracted by the smallest things such as flies on his paper. But why does he fool around so much if he is in such a poor state of living?
Just as we find distractions from the cruelness of the world in the internet, the protagonist of Hunger finds distractions from his horrid life in his crazy tangents. Although the character believes he is a strong willed man, the reason the man does what he does is because he can’t bare the life he has. He cannot stand to face the world he has so he creates little worlds of his own and gets carried away with these stories so that he does not have to live in the real world.
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