59 pages • 1 hour read
Charles BukowskiHam on Rye
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The novel contains depictions of sexual abuse, domestic abuse, misogyny, sexual harassment, mental illness, bestiality, alcohol addiction, animal cruelty, overt and damaging racism, child abuse, bullying, severe violence, death by suicide, and anti-gay bias. This guide sometimes quotes offensive or problematic language related to these topics. Nazi supporters and attitudes make appearances in the work. The novel also includes negative comments about those with disabilities.
Henry Chinaski Junior is the thinly-veiled pseudonym used by the novel’s author, Charles Bukowski. Henry narrates his first memory, when he sits beneath a table watching the adults in Germany in 1922. His childhood memories include Christmas trees, eating, and “two large people fighting” (9). His mother, Katherine, and his father, Henry, fight frequently, often in their native German and often with Henry’s grandmother, Emily. Even after the family moved to California, Emily visited regularly and continues to do so. His grandfather, Leonard, has an alcohol addiction and is a former German Army officer who moved the family to America and then grew estranged from the family. During one visit, Leonard gifts Henry Junior his war medal and his gold pocket watch.
Chapter 2 Summary
Henry’s family owns a Ford Model-T car. They take regular drives through the California countryside. On one Sunday picnic, Henry Junior watches his father steal oranges from an orchard until a man with a shotgun chases them back to the car. When he drives away, Henry Senior swears he is “coming back some day” to take revenge (15).
Chapter 3 Summary
Henry Senior has two brothers with alcohol addictions: Ben and John. He claims that “neither of them amount to anything” (16). Henry Senior also dislikes Katherine’s siblings and does not care for children. When Ben is dying, Katherine insists on visiting him. Henry Senior threatens to tell the staff that “those prostitutes” (18) are bringing cigarettes to Ben even though he has tuberculosis. Henry Senior then insists on leaving immediately. He refuses to explain to his son which other diseases Ben might have caught.
Chapter 4 Summary
On another Sunday, Katherine suggests they visit John. She says he “ran away from home early” (20), so he never stood a chance in life. Amid a racist tirade against Asian people, Henry Senior agrees to visit John. Henry Junior is introduced to John’s impoverished family, including John’s wife, Anna, and his daughters, Katherine and Betsy. John, they say, left on his motorcycle some time ago. Anna explains the family is struggling for money and John is wanted by the police for making counterfeit dimes. Henry Senior claims he heard a rumor that John was accused of rape. Anna excuses her husband’s crimes, but Henry Senior refuses “to let him off the hook so easily” (24). Henry Senior becomes annoyed and insists on leaving; Katherine presents Anna with two boxes of canned food. She waves to Anna as the car drives away, but Henry Junior mimics his father. He does not wave back.
Chapter 5 Summary
Henry realizes he “[has] begun to dislike [his] father” (26). Henry Senior is angry and argumentative. He insists on keeping his son away from the other children because they are poor, even though the Chinaski family only “imagined themselves rich” (27). In kindergarten, the other children’s happiness confuses Henry. In grammar school, Henry witnesses violent bullying.
Chapter 6 Summary
Henry does not have friends in school. He feels better alone and considers the other children to be “foolish” (29). One day, he shares lunch with a “cross-eyed” new boy named David. On David’s insistence, they walk home together. A group of older boys follows them. Henry watches the boys beat David. They threaten Henry, but he backs away until they get bored. When David reaches home, his mother complains that his clothes are covered in dirt and blood. She beats David, then sends him to practice his violin. Henry listens outside, feeling sick.
Chapter 7 Summary
The schoolboys fight often. Henry and David are always the last two boys chosen for the baseball games during recess. Henry is bad at baseball but determined to get better. Henry blames David for being socially ostracized. Though he tries to separate himself from David, he cannot do so. One day, Henry hits a home run. He never hits another, but the other boys always remember his success and subject him to a “better kind of hatred” (34). During football season, the kids play touch football, but Henry is too physical. Sent away from football, he refuses to play volleyball. During recess, he is knocked out by an errant football. The boys mock him because he “fainted like a lady” (34). Henry finds the boy who kicked the football, Billy Sherril, and hits him. Henry is taken to the principal’s office. The principal calls Henry a tough guy and shakes his hand, only to crush Henry’s hand in his adult grip. The principal gives Henry a note to deliver to his parents.
Chapter 8 Summary
Henry takes the sealed note to his parents. His tearful mother claims he brought shame on the family. His father beats him with a razor strop. While he experiences the first of many beatings, Henry’s thoughts drift. He weeps and then sits painfully on his mattress, examining his father’s roses through the window and thinking that he, like the roses, is “something that belonged to [his father] and not to [him]” (40).
Chapter 9 Summary
Still in pain from his beating, Henry joins his parents for dinner. Though he is not hungry, they force him to eat. After, Henry begins to believe these are not his parents; instead, he thinks, they “must have adopted [him] and now they are unhappy” with what he became (42).
Chapter 10 Summary
Henry’s solitary behavior is noticed by the girl who lives next door, Lila Jane. After introducing herself, she offers to show Henry her underwear and then returns to her house. Each day, she returns and shows Henry her underwear. One day, they take a walk and enter a vacant lot. He kisses her, but she complains they are being watched by nearby workmen. When a boy from a rival school enters Henry’s yard and starts a fight, Lila Jane throws a tin can at the boy’s head. Since she intervened on his behalf, Henry believes she “still likes [him]” (46).
Chapter 11 Summary
Henry learns to play kickball. He learns to stand up for himself against the boys who bullied him in the past. Even though the students in Henry’s school are from the poorest backgrounds, they frequently beat teams from other schools at sports. He remembers a particularly impressive victory against the team from Miranda Bell, a “wealthy district” (49), in which the kids did not know how to fight back.
Chapters 1-11 Analysis
Henry Chinaski, like Charles Bukowski, is an immigrant. He is born in Germany but moves with his family to the United States at a young age. The period in which Henry is raised and the nature of his background play a formative role in his development. He is a German who is raised during the inter-war period. His adoptive home country has recently taken part in World War I against Germany and other nations and also hurtles toward another showdown with Germany in the shape of World War II. The anti-German sentiment becomes much clearer to Henry in later life, but it helps to explain the vigor with which his father promotes the idea of The Illusion of the American Dream. To a recent immigrant from a potentially hostile country, Henry Senior is invested in the idea of the American Dream as an aspirational model for entrance into American culture. He is desperate to believe that it is true as it will make his life much easier. When he faces poverty and failure at every turn, however, he does not want to blame himself or his interpretation of the American Dream. He deals with a vast reservoir of pent up anger and resentment, which he then directs at his son. Henry Junior receives many beatings. These beatings are the manifestation of his father’s subconscious resentment toward the hostile society he encounters. Henry Junior suffers from his father’s mistakes, enduring the pain of Henry Senior’s pent up frustration that the American Dream that he was promised never actually became true. Although Henry Senior believes that all he has to do is work hard to become successful, he realizes, without knowing it, that the dream is a lie and that the system is stacked against him because he is poor. The family arrives in America to become successful but stays just as poor as when they moved.
Henry Senior is one of many failures in the Chinaski family. His older brothers have alcohol addiction; one of them is dying in hospice, while the other is on the run for a string of crimes, including rape. Furthermore, Henry Senior’s father Leonard (Henry Junior’s grandfather) has similar troubles and is a despondent figure. He is estranged from his wife and family, relying on alcohol to numb the pain of his existence. These older figures in the Chinaski family provide Henry Senior with some source of comfort: No matter how much poverty he endures, he compares himself favorably to his brothers and his father. They also serve to shadow the self-destructive path of Henry Junior’s future. Henry Junior, like his forebears, will turn to alcohol to numb the pain of Social Alienation Caused by Poverty. Like them, his alcohol addiction will lead to trouble and suffering. The pains of the previous generations do not provide lessons for the following generation to learn. Instead, they demonstrate the way in which violence, abuse, and trauma echo across the generations. In this way, the novel presents Henry Junior as almost suffering from fate itself. His family is all traumatized in different ways; he emerges as an amalgamated product of their various traumas. The poverty that the family lives him separates them from the rest of society and separates them from each other. The alcohol further drives them apart, as it creates fights among them and wedges each of them more deeply into themselves.
The poverty and abuse that Henry Junior endures on a daily basis imbues him with a desire to fight. Henry views fighting as a demonstration of his toughness and his ability to endure. He can endure his father’s beatings, he can endure his friendless existence, and he can endure the bullying of the older boys. Many people in Henry’s school exhibit this same attitude. Henry notes that he and his classmates may be from one of the poorest schools in the area, but they can defeat the better-fed and better-equipped boys with less trauma from other schools in all manner of sports. Henry attributes this to his ability to suffer. He can suffer like no one else, he tells himself, because suffering is all he has known. In this sense, Henry’s nascent skills as a writer are already beginning to show. He is writing himself a narrative in which his suffering turns him into a protagonist, if not quite a hero. Henry portrays himself as the underdog and the antihero, someone who endures, and he suffers, defeating his foes through his pain threshold more than his actual talent. This idea also speaks to The Life Story of Poverty, as the novel itself is a coming-of-age tale of Henry and is a semi-autobiographical novel of Bukowski. The narrative of Henry’s story, however, is simply poverty and the oppressive effects of poverty. His narrative amounts only to the effects of poverty, and by the novel’s end, that is all he has become. The desire to be tough only wedges him more deeply into the stereotype of the working-class man. He fights the rich kids and further ostracizes himself from them.
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