Charles Bukowski Analysis

726 Words2 Pages

Charles Bukowski’s writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of the city of Los Angeles. As a result of his rough social and physical upbringing Bukowski is able to capture the reality of life by drawing on personal experience and uses themes of sex, alcohol and violence in his raw style of writing. His work speaks volumes on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing itself, alcohol, relationships with women, and daily grind of work. While Bukowski did end up having an FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in the LA underground newspaper Open City, and his possible draft evasion, he also wrote countless poems, short stories, six novels and would eventually publish over sixty book, I have decided to focus on a single piece of his work, Love is a Dog From Hell, and three poems entitled The 6 Foot Goddess, Sandra, You and Pacific Telephone. In these poems we can see the sexual tendencies that Bukowski is known for, while also revealing his inner machismo. It is by using this poem that I will show that Charles Bukowski may have been an extremely talented writer, but he was also a very sexually oriented person that had a constant obsession with women that could never be quenched, only abated through his writing.
Charles Bukowski was born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach Germany to his father Henry, a sergeant in the United States Army, and his mother Katharina. At the age of two Bukowski’s parents immigrated back to the United States from Germany where they settled in Los Angeles. His father believed in firm discipline, both mental and physical and often beat Bukowski for the smallest offenses, Bukowski would later describe his early life as saying...

... middle of paper ...

...l more appealing and he cannot escape the life of drugs or alcohol in his writing any more than he could escape them in reality.
Even More of this narcissistic writing comes to play in the poem entitled “You”. In this selection he is describing a women talking to her lover in which she is continuously feeding into his ego and physical vanity. She also continues to bolster his machismo by comparing him to a beast. This mentality is something that Bukowski seems to feed off over during the course of his writing. She is constantly comparing her lover to an animal, or a beast. She refers to his hands as paws and his and the woman tells her lover that his balls are the biggest she’d ever seen and that he “shoots sperm like a whale shoots water out of the hole in its back” (You). Again feeding into the self promoting ways that we find prevalent in many of Bukowski’s works.

Open Document