Ham on Rye

By the end of the novel, Henry has resigned himself to a life of poverty. In a practical sense, poverty has been one of the few constants in his life, and he does not know or expect anything else. During his early years, he is not aware of his own poverty. When he goes to school, however, he begins to discern that some children have better lunches, better clothes, and better lifestyles than he does. His family simply cannot afford to live like his fellow students and, with an emerging sense of the relationship between material wealth and social class, Henry begins to mentally divide his classmates into groups of rich kids and poor kids. Henry is very much in the latter category and, to him, the rich kids seem to belong to an entirely separate world. This division leaves Henry with a lingering sense of resentment toward everything. He resents a society that would allow such division to happen to a child by chance. He resents the rich for not sharing their wealth with the poor. He resents his parents for bringing him into a life of poverty, blaming everyone around him for the pain of being poor. This theme also speaks to the novel’s title. Rather than Bukowski delivering a meditative book on the loss of innocence in modern America, he delivers one on the brutalities of poverty, of eating simple ham sandwiches. Bukowski does not deliver a novel as beautifully-worded as The Catcher in the Rye but instead gives readers Ham on Rye. The title, of a semi-autobiographical story about one youth’s growing up, suggests this is all Henry amounts to: a ham sandwich, an emblem of his poverty. Bukowski’s story, too, amounts to nothing more than a ham sandwich. Even the aesthetic of the novel itself is segregated from the rich novel’s aesthetic, Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, being a student at an expensive private high school in the northeast.

Henry is born during a time when poverty was worsening in the United States. The Great Depression had the effect of throwing millions of hard-working Americans into poverty, including Henry’s parents. His family was never rich, but the Great Depression causes both of his parents to lose their jobs, he feels the weight of poverty pushing down upon him. His clothes are tattered and cheap, while he cannot afford any of the hobbies or pastimes that his friends enjoy. The crashed economy brings many Americans into a state of poverty, creating an influx of people into the lowest social classes. Henry was born poor and is made poorer. His understanding of social class becomes more pronounced with this worsening poverty, as anyone rich enough to endure the hardship of the Great Depression becomes an enemy in his eyes. At the same time, however, the Great Depression shows Henry the universality of poverty. There is no moral valence or weight to poverty; it is simply something that everyone is made to endure. Whereas Henry Senior once criticized people who did not work hard enough and who did not try to find jobs, his own struggles throw his comments into sharp relief. Henry Junior comes to see his father as full of bluster on such matters. Poverty, he realizes, is not indicative of moral failing. Rather, it is a class system perpetuating itself for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the poor. Henry sees through the illusions of America, sees through appearances, and in this sense it is empowering. He does not suffer because of a defect, and he decides he will no longer participate in the game, will no longer work himself to death for a goal that cannot be achieved. He is, by the novel’s end, within the misery but free from an effort to escape it. His life story here is not a story of achieving success; it is a life story of poverty, where he does not participate in the system or in the narrative.

This realization combines with the resentment, which is always present in Henry’s psyche. His own experiences and desires cause him to create a moral mythology around poverty, which makes him feel better about himself. According to Henry, those who have endured poverty are taught how to suffer. This suffering breeds a resilience and a toughness that is impossible for any rich person to attain. While Henry has nothing, he assures himself he will always have the toughness that he learned from his hard times. His toughness is a value and a virtue that cannot be taken away by a collapsing economy or a repossession order. Henry wants to fight the world that has treated him so badly, and he, as he well understands, is not really built to fight. While he may not have the physical dimensions or the training to fight everyone, he will always have his toughness. This toughness will endure through anything, as he has been taught to do by his experiences of growing up poor. Henry develops this pathology of toughness out of necessity. He knows that he will never be rich, and he has no aspirations to try to be, but he needs to believe that he has something that the rich social elites cannot take from him. He turns his poverty into a private virtue, which is his and his alone. The novel leaves it ambiguous as to whether this is truly something that can be called good, however. Henry believes it has value, but it is likely that nothing good comes from living in poverty and that Henry is deluding himself. This toughness seems to identify him even more clearly with his class, with his father, and wedges him and others within poverty further into poverty through in-class fighting and self-destructive behavior.