69 pages • 2-hour read
Post Office
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use.
The Racetrack
Throughout Post Office, Hank spends much of his time at the racetrack, winning and losing money by gambling on horses. Gambling was an important part of Bukowski’s life; it features heavily in his other novels, such as Women (1978), and informs the attitude of the title of his short story and poem collection, Betting on the Muse (1996). In Post Office, the racetrack symbolizes freedom and thematically links to The Futility of Formally Resisting Authority. The fact that Hank spends so much time at the track depicts his reliance on it as a means of escape from the tedious drudgery of his everyday life.
In addition, most of his romantic entanglements begin at the track, including his marriage to Joyce, his brief relationship with Vi, and the ill-fated encounter with Mary Lou. Hank goes to the racetrack after Betty’s funeral, suggesting that he views it as a safe space in which to grieve, even if his grief consists of getting drunk and having a one-night stand. Most importantly, the racetrack symbolizes an escape from a life of meaningless toil, constant frustrations, failed relationships, and poverty.
Hank develops a system of betting on the horses that, for a time, pays great dividends, allowing him a taste of the good life while he takes a break from the post office, and he drives up and down the coast, dines on steaks, drinks fine liquor, and stays at motels with ocean views. The racetrack provides Hank with a better life than the monotonous stability of his job as a postal clerk ever did, and it allows him to be his own boss, providing him with a template for life that he hoped to replicate once he became a writer.
Absurdity and Humor
An undercurrent of absurdity and humor runs through Post Office, a common motif in many of Bukowski’s novels. Hank’s sense of humor (dry and biting) isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s also a coping mechanism that emphasizes the novel’s broader themes concerning resistance and the soul-crushing nature of bureaucracy. His interactions with supervisors, coworkers, and the public on his delivery routes often display this interplay between despair and humor.
When Hank mocks the system or responds to cruelty with sarcastic indifference, he transforms degradation into defiance. His humor reclaims agency from those who would otherwise reduce him to a cog in the machine. This absurdity isn’t simply comic relief but a lens through which Bukowski critiques the American work ethic and its worship of meaningless productivity. In this sense, Hank’s jokes function as small acts of resistance, gestures that keep him human even as the institution attempts to grind him down.
In addition, the absurdist tone gives the novel its distinctive moral texture. Rather than presenting heroism or redemption, Bukowski presents survival through irony. His humor is bleak, but it keeps both Hank and readers aware of the underlying absurdity of the systems people accept as normal. Even at his lowest (hungover, exhausted, or humiliated), Hank maintains the capacity to laugh, and through that laughter, he refuses to be entirely conquered. The humor thus becomes inseparable from Bukowski’s worldview: Laughing at society’s absurdity is the best way to maintain one’s sanity in a senseless world.
Joyce’s Parakeets
After they move back to Los Angeles from Texas, Joyce complicates Hank’s life by exhausting him with her sexual appetite and bringing animals home without consulting him. In addition to the dimwitted dog, Picasso, Joyce purchases two parakeets: one green and yellow, and the other red and green. For Hank, the parakeets symbolize both a lack of control over life and the opportunity for freedom. Their caged life represents being trapped in ignorance: “What do they know of pain in their little cage? Eggheads yakking! Just feathers; brains the size of a pinhead” (81).
When Hank presents them with the opportunity to escape, the birds’ behavior mimics human behavior in similar circumstances. Just as some people readily seize any opportunity that comes their way, the green parakeet leaves the cage immediately. Recognizing freedom, “[h]e [doesn’t] fly. He [shoots] straight up into the sky. Up, up, up, up. Straight up!” (82). The red bird, on the other hand, takes longer to make up its mind, torn between freedom and the comfort that the cage provides. Hank reflects, “It [is] a hell of a decision. Humans, birds, everything [have] to make these decisions. It [is] a hard game” (82).
Years later, Hank thinks of the parakeets as he tenders his final resignation from the post office: “I was like Joyce’s damned parakeets. After living in the cage I had taken the opening and flown out—like a shot into the heavens” (192). This is as close to an explanation as Bukowski gives for why he stayed so long in a job he hated, a job that wore him down mentally and physically. It’s sometimes more difficult to leave the familiarity of an unpleasant situation for the uncertainty of life beyond the “cage” one has come to know.
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