“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 his spectators – they even hire and station butchers to guard him for fear that he may be eating behind their backs. It is only the artist who knows that he is not eating behind everyone’s backs, and yet the public does not show any confidence in him. They fail to appreciate the true nature of his work: “The honor of his art forbade it. Naturally, none of the watchers understood that. Sometimes there were nightly groups of watchers who carried out their vigil very laxly, deliberately sitting together in a distant corner and putting all their attention into playing cards there, clearly intending to allow the hunger artist a small refreshment, which, according to their way of thinking, he could get from some secret supplies” (Johnstonia: The Hunger Artist). The alienation of the artist is made stronger by the presence of the audience who did not believe that he was true to his craft.
This alienation has resulted in the artist’s inability to define himself outside of being one; his sole identity has been limited to that of being a hunger artist who starves himself as part of his craft and in order to earn a living (Burt, 224). Everyone knows him as someone who starves himself in front of people and who may be sneaking in a bite or two when no one is looking, but no one has bothered to find out how dedicated the artist is to his profession, and why he has decided on taking such a task in life. Experts aver that this may have been due to his partly schizoid personality, which is reflected in his own diary: “The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free them without ripping apart. And a thousand times rather tear in me they hold back or buried. For this I'm here, that's quite clear to me” (McElroy, 217).
Kafka may have been drawing parallels between his life and the life of the Hunger Artist. It is said that he never settled down in life with a permanent partner – he was thought to be a womanizer, but one suddenly realizes that he may have felt a certain emptiness in his own life, which he thought could be assuaged through womanizing. He was a frequent visitor of brothels as well (Stach, 43). He was never satisfied enough to settle down with a long-term partner. This makes his situation similar to that of the hunger artist in the story. The hunger artist never realizes any self-actualization or spiritual reward out of his craft. He continues to waste away, and there is simply no satisfaction for him. He is also rather “empty” at his own deathbed, and one finds out the reason why he permanently became a hunger artist is because he never liked any food that he tasted, and this gave him the impetus to starve himself. This makes one think that the artist’s death was meaningless, just like the dissatisfaction that he felt while alive.
Kafka makes use of the tool of juxtaposition at the end to perhaps show how people have become more interested in life than in death. In fact, he was lying there for several days and no one even bothered to check if he was still there, or more importantly, if he was still alive and breathing. The hunger artist is literally buried alive in straw. The circus supervisor talks to him as if to console him, but once the artist breathes his last, he is immediately taken away. A healthy, wild and robust panther is put in the cage. People now begin to flock to the panther, as they are excited by its show of life and zest, as opposed to the withering away of the hunger artist before their very eyes. People are in love with life, and not with death, as one may say.
However, this is where the irony comes in. While alive, the hunger artist freely chose to starve. He remained true to his craft by starving, although this was helped in part by his dislike of the food that was given to him. However, he starved himself because he felt that it was the noble thing to do as a hunger artist. On the other hand, the panther is alive, is strong, is healthy and is wild, but he is in a cage. He has no choice but to live the rest of his days in the cage, except for perhaps he may be brought out to walk or to participate in another act.
Thus Kafka may have presented the hunger artist as one who was alienated from the rest of society, but the artist in the end is one who freely elected to do what he did in his life. No one may have believed in him and in his profession, but largely, what he did was of his own free will. Kafka may have been talking about his own soul – how he felt that he was alienated from many of his kind, and how he may have turned to womanizing and writing for his own sake. But one insight at this point in time is that Kafka did what he did out of his own free will. He wrote voluminously, womanized when he felt he wanted to with wild abandon, but he did the things that he wanted to do because he felt true to his craft and to his being a human being. He was also an artist, remaining true to his craft no matter what.
Works Cited
Burt, Daniel. The Biography Book. A Reader’s Guide to Non Fiction, Fictional, and Film Biographies of More than 500 of the Most Fascinating Individuals of All Time. 2001. Westport, CT: Oryx Press.
Johnstonia. The Hunger Artist. 2015. Web.
McElroy, Bernard. The Art of Projective Thinking: Franz Kafka and the Paranoid Vision. Modern Fiction Studies, 31(2):217.
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. 2005. NY: Harcourt.
