Thursday, November 6, 2008
Franz Kafka "A Hunger Artist"
In this short story, Franz Kafka tells the tale of an artist who finds that his art is fasting. I have read other Kafka's works before, and find that they are all rooted in depicting an emptiness in the story that he can never fill. For example in this story it was his stomach. This artist is actually a part of a circus, and his public who cheers him on is also his main source of confliction, for he thinks that they are the ones holding him back from achieving his greatness. He claims that fasting for 40 days is no feat at all, and that people are foolish for praising him for it. As time goes on and his popularity dies, he is left in his cage not as the main attraction but the opening to the animals in their cages. He is left unnoticed, and without the crowds attention fasts for many many days past his previous success's. He strave's himself to death, and claims it was because he never found it hard not to eat because he did not favor any taste of any food. I think that Kafka was a very lost soul.
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3 comments:
Interesting info on Kafka, thanks. It does make it easier to understand this story when you know about the author's writing being a bit about himself. Kafka indeed must have had a void he could not fill if all his stories contained a character with such emptiness. Such emptiness that this character, the hunger artist, says he couldn't even find a food that he enjoyed. I must look at Kafka's bio.
Emptiness in society, yes. He of course is not trying to fill his stomach--why not? How might this be symbolic of larger socio-cultural issues. The "food" he could not find is also very suggestive, symbolically speaking. See my opening comments on the class blog.
I do see an emptiness in this story like in "The Metamorphosis." In both cases, the protagonist passes from a period of being observed as an oddity to one of being ignored and neglected, as each becomes more isolated from humanity. Both do stop eating and eventually die with no one really paying attention. By the end of each life, the character seems pathetic, unloved, alienated from society and lacking the will to live. I hope Kafka did not always feel this way himself.
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