A Comparison of Bukowski's Factotum and Barfly

Charles Bukowski, author of the novel Factotum, and writer of the screenplay for the movie Barfly, creates a character for the reader and viewer that I consider to be a completely true character. Not only in the way that Bukowski himself resembles and seems to be the truth behind the character but in the way that Henry Chinaski, the character, is true to himself. Chinaski loves to drink, write, and be free. This may not appear to be a trustworthy character at first, but during each story you come to rely on Chinaski and trust him to be your mentor as you become a voyeur in to his world.�

In the novel Factotum, you are introduced to Chinaski. You become acquainted with the fact that he is intoxicated for the entirety of the novel, that he cannot keep a job for more than at most a few weeks, and that he goes through women as if they were toilet paper. Until he meets Jan. Jan is almost the exact same character as Chinaski; she has a passion for drinking, and has almost the same outlook on life and work as he does. At first Jan seems just another woman in the long string of women that Chinaski sleeps with in the novel, but as the chapters progress you begin to realize that Chinaski had found the woman that he spoke of with his racetrack buddy Manny, a woman who drinks, smokes, and loves to have sex. I feel that this book is not only about his movement from job to job, but also mainly about how he somewhat found a small piece of himself in Jan.�

In the movie Barfly we once again meet up with Chinaski, but not in any way is it a continuation to the novel that preceded it. The movie to me was a culmination of Chinaski's character, shoved into an hour and 40 minutes. Bukowski took all of the essential pieces of Chinaski and created a movie around them to show the viewer the most important pieces of Chinaski's world. When I watched the movie, I felt like the movie was somewhat of a summary of Chinaski's tales, it showed his drinking, his joblessness, and his women. The movie also contained a Jan-like character whose name was Wanda. From watching the movie I was able to see a different side to this character. Although Wanda was not in the book, to me when I was watching it she was Jan. This could just be my bias to the novel coming through, but she did show many similarities to Jan. Other than the obvious characteristics like drinking and promiscuity, she had many of the same attitudes that Jan had in the novel. She had the same complacent attitude towards life as Jan did in the novel. Throughout the film Wanda would try to find different ways to draw attention to herself. It looked to me that she was constantly trying to put on a show for Chinaski, trying to win his attention in particular. When Wanda cooked the stolen unripe corn and tried to eat it and basically flipped out was when I first realized that she was going to be a character that would feed off of the attention of those around her. In ever scene that Wanda got emotional, she made sure that she was overdoing the amount of emotion that she had in order to get as much attention as possible from Chinaski.�

I enjoyed both Factotum and Barfly equally. Factotum strongly resembled a novel that could have easily been considered a Beat book if it had been written 20 years earlier. I think that is why I liked Bukowski's writing so much, because I could picture him drinking with Jack Kerouac, or stealing cars in a fictional world with Neal Cassidy. The movie for me was a clearer look in to the world of the characters that Bukowski had created for us in Factotum, I enjoyed the movie for this reason, because it allowed me to visualize the character I had been reading about and had been so fascinated with in the novel. It is true that Barfly is not a continuum of Factotum, but I think that it could be some of the stories that we did not get in the novel. That what happens in Barfly was what happened between chapters to Chinaski, the things that were not written about in the novel.