Novel: Factotum

Overview
Charles Bukowski’s Factotum follows Henry Chinaski, his hard-drinking alter ego, through a ragged circuit of low-wage jobs, cheap rooms, and late-night writing during the World War II era. The title nods to a worker who does “everything,” and Chinaski does, shipping, clerking, factory work, day labor, only to drift or be fired, almost always for the same reasons: boredom, contempt for authority, missing shifts, and alcohol. The novel is episodic rather than plotted in a conventional arc, moving city to city and job to job, as Chinaski insists on calling himself a writer even when no one else will. The result is a spare, bleakly funny portrait of survival on the margins and the stubborn faith required to keep a private vocation alive in an indifferent world.

Story
Rejected for military service, Chinaski leaves Los Angeles and bounces through places like New Orleans, New York, and small Midwestern stops, the scenery repeating: flophouses with peeling paint, greasy diners, warehouses humming, bars that open too early and close too late. He takes whatever work he can get, loading docks, filing rooms, factory floors, and loses most of it quickly. He is either late, drunk, insubordinate, or simply walks out when the supervisor’s voice becomes unbearable. Each job teaches him the same lesson: the wage buys a little time, a little liquor, a little rent, and the feeling of being caged.

At night and in hangovers he pecks at short stories, stuffs envelopes, and waits for the thin reply that almost always says no. Rejection slips accumulate; so do cab rides paid with last dollars, pawn tickets for typewriters, and the habit of waking in unfamiliar rooms beside women he barely remembers. Two relationships anchor the drift. Laura appears and vanishes with the same volatility as his jobs, an interlude of tenderness edged by scarcity. Jan, tougher and more enduring, drinks with him, rooms with him, fights and reconciles, then vanishes again when the money or patience runs out. With both women, affection is real but fragile; the bar is their church and shelter, and every sermon ends with a tab.

Chinaski gambles at the track, nurses grudges against supervisors, and keeps moving. The country hums with wartime industry and postwar prosperity, but the novel lives in its basements and alleys, the part of America built to be swept up after closing time. He survives not by reform but by endurance, a mulish refusal to pretend that the work means more than it does.

Characters
Henry Chinaski narrates in a flat, sardonic voice that turns humiliation into deadpan comedy. Jan and Laura are companions and foils, mirrors for his tenderness and failure. Employers, timekeepers, landladies, and barflies revolve through the chapters as types rather than portraits, petty tyrants, soft-hearted losers, fellow fugitives from respectability, emphasizing how interchangeable the institutions and faces of his world feel to him.

Themes and Style
Factotum strips work to a transaction and art to an obsession. It is about the economy of survival: how much soul a person spends to buy another day. The novel treats drinking not as rebellion but as anesthetic, and romance as truce rather than salvation. Its style is clipped, repetitive by design, built from vignettes that rhyme across cities and years. The humor is caustic, the tenderness unexpected, the dignity found in refusal, refusal to believe that a steady paycheck equals meaning.

Ending
Nothing resolves; everything clarifies. Chinaski ends where he often is: broke, alone in a rented room, typing again. He accepts that he will keep working when he must and quitting when he can, that he will keep losing and keep writing. The last note is not triumph but persistence, a stubborn bet on the only vocation he recognizes.