Factotum Characters: Henry Chinaski, Jan, Laura & Key Figures
Characters
Henry Chinaski
Role: The narrator and chief character in Factotum. Henry Chinaski is a classic antihero.
He is green-eyed and the son of a workaholic World War I veteran who is critical of his son’s 4-F draft status during World War II for psychological reasons. Henry is addicted to alcohol and sex, and he has drunk his way through two years at Los Angeles City College while studying journalism.
He works when he must, flops in the cheapest places he can find, eats when he can, and drinks constantly.
The novel follows Henry’s misadventures getting and losing jobs in New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles again, Miami, and Los Angeles a third time.
His attempts to parlay his two years of journalism into an editorial job at the Los Angeles Times fail, and he does a miserable job as a janitor. He also fails at an automobile brake parts company, the Yellow Cab Company, the Graphic Cherub Art Supply Company, and the Honeybeam Company. Laid off as the National Bakery Goods’ Coconut Man, he does well at the Hotel Sans until he begins drinking on the job. Henry and Jan are evicted and split up. He misses an opportunity to pick tomatoes in Bakersfield, gets tossed out of Workmen for Industry for drinking, and in the end finds he cannot even get an erection watching a stripper in the Roxie Theater.
Jan Meadows
Jan’s meanness and hostility excite Henry sexually. She is hot in the morning when hung over, while Henry prefers sex at night. She can be playful in bed, making a little paper hat for Henry’s penis before devouring him.
They spend a lot of time at the racetrack and otherwise do little but drink wine, make love, and steal cigarettes from parked cars during evening walks.
Henry cannot figure out why he does not get rid of Jan. She is compulsively unfaithful—the dirtier the better—and she argues constantly to justify herself. Henry reminds himself not all women are whores—just his.
Laura
A once-beautiful blonde whom Henry Chinaski meets in a Los Angeles bar, Laura has retained long, lovely legs and a firm body, but she is obviously an alcoholic. She accepts drinks from Henry until he goes broke, and then takes him to a store to stock his room with liquor, beer, cigarettes, chips, nuts, Alka-Seltzer, and a good cigar, all charged to Wilbur Oxnard’s account.
As they lie in bed, Laura worries about crazy men who dismember or disfigure girls they pick up. Henry is inside her before he gets around to asking her name.
Herman Barnes
The maintenance superintendent at the Times Building in Los Angeles, Barnes assigns Henry to polish brass, only to find him in a bar across the street having a beer. He gives Henry a second chance, replacing burnt-out fluorescent tubes, and accepts Henry’s fear of heights as an excuse for doing nothing. Finally, he puts Henry under Jacob Christensen as a night janitor. When the two men discover Henry asleep in the ladies’ room, he is fired.
Mr. and Mrs. Chinaski
Henry’s parents, the unnamed Chinaskis, still live in Los Angeles. Father is brown-haired and taller than Henry, a proud World War I veteran who is intolerant of Henry’s 4-F draft status. Mother is easily upset. Both are still working, with Mother having just taken a new job. Father insists that Henry find a job immediately and pay room, board, and laundry. When Henry shows up drunk on the doorstep, parents and son assault one another viciously. When he bails Henry out of jail, he adds legal costs. Henry moves out as soon as he is paid up. Jan later declares that his hatred for his parents warps Henry.
Jacob Christensen
Jacob Christensen is Henry Chinaski’s supervisor as a night janitor in the Times Building in Los Angeles. Christensen is concerned that Henry not tangle with his best janitor, scrappy Old Huge. Christensen and his boss Herman Barnes discover Henry asleep in the ladies’ room and he is fired.
Darlene
An aging stripper at the Roxie in Los Angeles, Darlene appears to be looking for a comeback and Henry is on her side, but even when her bra and G-string are discarded, Henry cannot get an erection.
Mrs. Downing
Henry’s kind landlady in St. Louis, Mrs. Downing makes him soup when she hears he is ill. She is, just as Henry imagines, a widow and very religious.
Tony Endicott
A gray-haired old man who takes over Henry Chinaski and Jan’s seats in the grandstands at the Los Alamitos Racetrack, Endicott boasts to Jan that he makes $60,000 after taxes in real estate. When Jan begins flirting, Henry picks Endicott up by his shirt collar and threatens to push him through the bleachers, thirty-five feet to the ground. Endicott bites Henry’s ear and Henry grabs his throat. When Henry pries Endicott’s fingers off the bench and watches him plunge, others bury their noses in the racing form. It turns out the murder is a nightmare, although the results of the race are as Henry remembers.