Essays on A Hunger Artist

As notions of “self-care,” (that is, of prioritizing one’s personal health) become increasingly common, the challenge of mental illness remains stigmatized if not least because it is generally invisible. Both in life and in literature, we can often glean understanding not only from what can be observed in narrative, but also through its gaps and disjunctions. In the case of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” the protagonist’s extended fasting is not a direct concern of mental illness, but one of spectacle with his audience “marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ...

“The Hunger Artist” is a short story that was written by Franz Kafka that was initially published in 1922. The main character of the story is a hunger artist who remains faithful to his craft and who fears that the people who watch him completely misunderstand him. There is the insight that crowds used to appreciate this kind of “performance”, but that during this time, people refuse to believe in such anymore. One might say that the main idea of this short story is the alienation of many artists from society. The artist has a very troubled relationship with ...

Dr.

Comparison Contrast Essay

A Comparative Analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” There are both similarities and differences between the short stories A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and A Hunger Artist, but it is certain that these two stories can be compared on several levels. Every man deserves to be treated with respect in spite of being different than most people. Both of the stories have the main characters who do not fit in the society, who are different and deserve to be accepted for who ...

Franz Kafka is a famous German-language writer, who is widely admitted as one of the major figures of the twentieth-century world literature. He is famous for his novels and short stories focused on the themes of drama and isolation, opposition of a man and society that could not accept him. During his rather short life, Kafka wrote a number of works, which met with recognition from the public only after his death. One of such works was A Hunger Artist, a story he wrote in his declining years in 1922. The aim of this paper is to analyze symbolism ...

The Hunger artist in Franz Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist” on the surface suffers from pangs of hunger from not eating. But his real suffering is deeper, and it is the cause of him being a hunger artist in the first place. The protagonist’s worldview is of his own making, and because of it his is unable to adjust to the normal world and instead is trapped in both a mental and physical cage. The hunger artist at times cares about what the onlookers of his art think, and at other times he seems greatly concerned about ...

A comparison between two ‘black sheep’

A Hunger Artist and Bartleby 2 Abstract There are certain people with strange behaviors that are usually out of conception for others in their vicinity. There are two short stories- A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville which depict the stories of two peculiar characters. Both were stuck with something painful or strange in their lives and refused completely to behave normally or in any compliance with the society. Both the characters had their reasons. And hence, no one could try reasoning with them successfully. This short essay illuminates the comparison ...