Hunger Artist Discussion Essay Sample

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 this. This preoccupation is a symptom of his thinking which often seems contradictory. He wants the public to accept and realize not just how difficult his undertaking is, but how there is nothing to prevent them from undertaking such a feet. The narrator writes, “For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how easy it was to fast” (Kafka, 2).
While everyone enjoys the spectacle of the hunger artist, the hunger artist instead has a persecution complex in which he sees those who have come to see him, those who allow him to make a living, in a negative light. The narrator writes, “no on had any cause to be dissatisfied with the proceedings, no one except the hunger artist himself, he only, as always” (Kafka, 3).
The way the hunger artist dies is from his fasting. At the end of his life when he is asked why he has chosen to live his life as a hunger artist he tells the overseer of the circus that “because I couldn’t find the food that I liked” (Kafka, 5). But there is a deeper meaning here, and it is meant to represent that he never found a way to fit the normalcy of society.
The hunger artist blames fasting and the audience’s reaction to it to his disconnect. However, it is his thinking, his inner way of understanding the world, that is the underlying cause him to suffer an ongoing personal crisis.