comment on language / style

Post Office is Charles Bukowski's take on a life of mind-numbing and body-draining banality. The narrator, Henry ("Hand") Chinaski, is Bukowski's alter ego, waking up from days of drunkenness and deciding to write an autobiographical novel. Although he is an inveterate alcoholic, Henry is an astute observer of the human condition and candid about his own foibles. He describes the generally depressing places he lives and works in gratuitous detail and reproduces long conversations verbatim. Interestingly, when a colleague writes a novel, Henry urges him to drop the inane dialog. Henry's dialog is brisk and sharp. In the brief periods of Henry's prosperity, he writes enthusiastically and optimistically about the condition, but shows no depression when slumping back into working-class poverty. He waxes most eloquent over his strategies for handicapping horse races, using the appropriate specialized vocabulary. When discussing his jobs, he also uses technical lingo, assuming its meaning is self-evident to readers, and often failing to explain himself for pages. The reader must discern from the context what Henry's "soup" is, and what postal employees mean by, e.g., bid, case, circular, dispatch, pouch, registered, throw, and zone. By the end of the novel, what Henry does for a living is clarified.