69 pages • 2-hour read
Post Office
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use and features cursing.
Henry (“Hank”) Chinaski
The protagonist of Post Office, Henry (“Hank”) Chinaski, is an antihero and a somewhat unreliable narrator. He’s middle-aged, around 33 at the beginning of the novel and around 49 by the end. As Bukowski’s fictional alter ego, Hank rejects conventional ambitions, approaching work, love, and conventional social structures with cynicism. For example, regarding his first post office job, he says, “I learned from the drunk up the hill […] that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure” (13). His occupation as a substitute and later full-time postal worker shapes his identity. The job’s drudgery, confrontations with supervisors, and punishing conditions emphasize the dehumanizing aspects of modern labor, thematically foregrounding Menial Labor and the Degradation of the Body and Spirit.
His refusal to conform, despite personal cost, never changes, establishing him as a character who values autonomy over societal approval. The story is told entirely through his perspective, which highlights raw, often abrasive observations. However, his heavy drinking, impulsive behavior, and occasional cruelty fragment his narration, complicating his credibility and forcing readers to weigh his descriptions against his unreliability.
Hank doesn’t make life easy for himself. His habits include staying out until two in the morning, drinking until dawn, and showing up to work hungover, which reveals a self-destructive streak that conflicts with his stubborn endurance. His ragged shoes and clothing represent both his poverty and resilience, marking him as a working-class figure ground down by conditions but not defeated. While much of his depiction is comic or grotesque, Hank also reveals moments of despair and vulnerability, particularly in his grief for Betty or when Fay leaves him, taking their daughter, Marina Louise, with her.
Hank resists transformation in the traditional sense. His story is one of persistence rather than redemption: He drifts from Betty to Joyce, from substitute routes to clerk positions, from despair to brief stability, without ever reconciling his alienation. His character personifies a kind of anti-romantic heroism that reflects Bukowski’s critique of mid-century American labor and conformity. However, his quitting his post office job to pursue his writing shows courage and some measure of personal growth.
Betty
Betty, Hank’s girlfriend during his early years in the post office, represents both companionship and instability. She frequently disappears, drinks heavily, and can’t provide Hank with a stable home life. However, despite these shortcomings, she’s central to Hank’s early character development. Their relationship embodies mutual self-destruction: Both drink heavily, stay out late, and undermine Hank’s chances of performing well at his grueling postal shifts. Betty is a relatively static character, functioning mostly as a mirror of Hank’s stagnation and reflecting his cycle of exhaustion and despair.
Betty symbolizes the chaotic freedom that Hank admires but that threatens to destroy him. She leaves him in Part 1 after he quits his job as a substitute mail carrier because, as a woman, she can’t stand having to support him, suggesting her conformity to the gender roles of the era, despite being an outcast like Hank. However, life isn’t kind to Betty in the years after their breakup. Forced to take a job as a hotel maid and alienated by her grown son and daughter, Betty continues to drink excessively. When she and Hank reconnect, many years have passed, and the ravages of alcoholism have taken their toll on her health. Hank’s enduring tender feelings for Betty, the care he takes to help his ailing friend, and the grief and rage he experiences at her death and funeral suggest that, besides his daughter, Betty is the character with whom he shares the deepest emotional connection.
Joyce
Joyce is a young Texan woman with long blonde hair whom Hank meets shortly after his breakup with Betty. Joyce is 23, and Hank is 36. He’s intentionally vague about their meeting. Joyce is impulsive, vain, has a small-town mentality, and is casual about cruelty to animals. All of these factors cause friction in Hank’s life: She abuses their dog, Picasso, and wakes Hank at all hours for sex, causing him to go to work exhausted. Joyce is the heiress to her family’s large fortune. For a time, she and Hank move to Texas, where her father harasses Hank, believing that he’s only interested in Joyce for her inheritance. Ultimately, Joyce decides that they should be independent and has them move back to Los Angeles to prove that they can make it on their own. Hank claims not to care about Joyce’s money; he follows her back to Los Angeles and gets a job, first at an art supply company, and then again at the post office.
Unlike Betty, Joyce represents a closer conformation to middle-class respectability for Hank. For a time, Joyce is content with her domestic role, cooking and cleaning for Hank, buying him a new wardrobe, and setting out his clothes before each of his shifts. However, their union quickly collapses due to the fundamental differences between them. Joyce’s impulsiveness and constant need for sex grate on Hank, but not as much as her small-town attitude: Her inability to dream big and her close-mindedness toward foreign food grate on Hank’s nerves, and he explodes at her for refusing an Asian feast he painstakingly prepared. Joyce’s impulsiveness ultimately results in her filing for a divorce after an argument. Additionally, she develops feelings for a suave coworker whom Hank calls “Purple Stickpin.’ After her divorce from Hank is finalized, Joyce is shocked to discover that Purple Stickpin had no real interest in her.
Jonstone
Hank’s immediate supervisor during the first part of Post Office, Jonstone, is the novel’s primary antagonist. A petty tyrant and blowhard, he’s so hard and cruel that he’s known as “The Stone” among the substitute mail carriers. Jonstone wears dark red shirts, which comically match his skin tone when he becomes angry. Through his cruelty, selective favoritism, willingness to betray his workers, and arbitrary punishments, he embodies the oppressive bureaucracy of the Postal Service. His presence in the narrative illustrates how systemic power corrupts individuals, and he drives Hank into open rebellion while also thematically illustrating The Futility of Formally Resisting Authority. Jonstone deliberately assigns Hank to the most difficult routes, writes him up for lateness, and withholds work as a form of harassment. These actions depict him as an archetypal villain within the novel’s workplace satire, more caricature than complex individual.
Jonstone’s power comes from his role, not his personality, making him a symbol of structural oppression rather than a fully rounded figure. Jonstone’s silence in key moments, such as when Hank returns after filing his complaint or when he ignores Hank’s needling questions about fired postal workers, adds to his menace, but also emphasizes the smallness of his character. He’s the face of the otherwise faceless cruelty of bureaucracy, where rules are applied inconsistently and punishment becomes a tool of control rather than fairness. In a broader sense, Jonstone embodies the antagonistic forces of work itself, a force that consumes individuality and rewards compliance over integrity. It’s an environment with which Hank is completely incompatible, so his clashes with Jonstone are inevitable.
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