Analysis Of A Hunger Artist

Peter Shaffer and Franz Kafka, the authors of Equus and Metamorphosis, reveal through their main characters’ struggles how society’s oppression causes a loss of identity. This oppression is caused by society’s obsession with what it believes to be normal and how society’s beliefs drive it to conform those who don’t fit its normal image. The two authors use their characters to symbolize the different views and judgments of society. And based on these judgments, the authors use two different types of oppression that cause different outcomes. Finally, this essay will reveal how the two authors use their characters to drain the protagonist’s identity to show society’s desire to conform.

Society is a person’s greatest antagonist. According to society, people need someone to tell them what to do, what to believe and even what to think. A story called The Metamorphosis, written by Franz Kafka, was able to express the idea that falling into a daily routine of following what the society wants us to do leads to our lives becoming meaningless. In addition, a poem called “The Unknown Citizen”, written by W.H. Auden, expressed the idea that “scientific data fails to capture the human quality of life” and that “our lives are largely shaped and dictated” by a greater society leading to the loss of a meaningful life (“The Unknown” 301). Despite the difference in the plot of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”,

In a world that has become immune to accepting all types of art, Marya Mannes believes we have lost our standards and ability to identify something as “good” or “bad”. In her essay, “How Do You Know It’s Good”, she discusses society’s tendency to accept everything out of fear of wrongly labelling something as being good or bad. She touches on various criteria to judge art, such as the artist’s purpose, skill and craftsmanship, originality, timelessness, as well as unity within a piece rather than chaos. She says that an individual must decide if something is good “on the basis of instinct, experience, and association” (Mannes). I believe that by using standards and the process of association, we will be able to judge what makes an art piece good in comparison to others. However, Mannes forces me to consider the difference between what may be appealing versus what is actually good, and when deciding which art we should accept, which is truly more important. I believe that “good” and “bad” are two ends of a large, subjective spectrum of grey area. It is possible for a piece of art to be good in some areas and bad in others, and if something does not live up to all of our standards, it does not necessarily mean it should be dismissed. Thus, I believe my personal standards for judging art are based on which my standards are largely based on the personal reaction evoked from a piece of art. Though I agree with Mannes’ standards to an extent, I believe that certain standards, such as evoking a personal response, can be more telling of if a piece of art is good as opposed to its timelessness, or the level of experience of an artist in his/her craft.

Despite being originally published in 1915, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a novella that is still relevant. All members of society are expected to do something in their lives, whether that be to get job, get married, go to school, or complete any number of other roles. While the jobs themselves may have changed since the release of Metamorphosis, this cycle is one that has continued on throughout the years. People today are still expected to get a job, get married, or go to school. Even Kafka’s characters experience this fate, and in his novella Metamorphosis, Kafka utilizes a rapid speed of events to emphasize the struggles of an “everyman” in fulfilling the strict roles put upon them by society.

“Hunger” is an article published in 1989 by social justice activist Maggie Helwig. In this article Helwig discusses the stereotypes behind eating disorders, and gives real life examples of the impacts an eating disorder can have on someone. She is able to incorporate many ideas that smoothly flow together to capture the audience’s attention, while also making the audience consider their thoughts and views on eating disorders. She ends the article by giving insightful information as to what it was like for her to suffer from an eating disorder, and why she chose to starve herself for eight years. Helwig uniquely incorporates logos, pathos, and ethos in her writing to completely gain the audience’s attention and influence their opinions on eating disorders.

Franz Kafka’s trademark is ridiculing his and the society’s blatant stories in subtle manner. With the help of paradigms what can be seen is that Franz Kafka’s use of humour in oddly places to clarify the asymmetry of the organized world and heightens the tension. It was also used to create even greater gaps both in scene and story line, to further stress the blackness felt in many of his stories. Studying his works it’s evident that Franz Kafka saw humor not only as a defence against the pain and anguish he felt inflicted upon him by the outside world, but also against the pain he rained upon himself. This technique was used to stress on the horrors of the big bad world. Although there have been resemblances of the protagonists’ character traits to his own self, he has brought out not only his own problems but on how people magnify and in

There is a lack of sympathy and anger toward the working conditions of people working in agriculture and aquaculture. In the film Business of Hunger we saw the displacement of people for agricultural goods such as, peanuts which are water and land intensive. In this film we saw how people in nations such as Brazil and Africa are not even acknowledged by the western nations who consume the food they export. Not only in agriculture are the workers exploited but my recent discovery of the shrimp industry has exposed the truth of slavery and child labor with the capturing of shrimp. Asking where your food comes is just one simply way of being a better consumer. When you go into a store and look for organic or certified food we argued in class that constitutes being good consumers, but what do those labels really mean? When more than half of the shrimp consumed in the United States comes from Thailand which has the most exploitative conditions, it would be hard to even believe the label. Before this course I had no clue shrimp was coming from exploitative condition and during the shrimp case study, I mentioned to my friend she should not eat shrimp due to the overexploitation of the workers and the environmental degradation of the land. She told me her mom worked in a shrimp farm while in Vietnam, I was surprised and asked her how she was okay with eating the shrimp after her mom told her of the harsh conditions and she responded to me “It’s Vietnam, what do you expect.” These

In the story "Hunger Artist" the panther who takes the hunger artist's place symbolizes the appreciation of life, fasting represents pride, and the forty-day period stands for the limit to everything. "The panther was all right"(Kafka). Despite the loss of freedom the panther possessed an ardent passion and joy. It didn't focus on things that was missing but on those that it still possess. On the contrary the hunger artist focus on pride, he abstains from thing he didn't like and could never find the thing he like. The 19th century represented an époque of great inventions: telephone, typewriter, lightbulb, etc.. The 19th century was a period of freedom and imagination. The Hunger Artist story aligned well with this context by showing how the

In his short story “The Hunger Artist,” Franz Kafka illustrates this prideful individual, who strives to starve himself to a disturbing and gruesome extent, losing his humanity. Kafka uses symbolism in order to fully create this idea of an individual’s, in this case the starving artist, estrangement from society.

Considering the ways in which the movie, Brazil, reflects and deviates from “A Hunger Artist” and “Panopticism” exposes the ways in which the Ministry’s systems of surveillance and authority manipulate and damage the human mind in order to maintain order and control of the public.

The boundaries of art and food are being pushed each day. As boundaries are pushed, the line between food and art becomes smaller, almost non-existent. Existence is a construct made by man, just as the creations of food and art. In the twenty-first century, nothing is positive and everything is arbitrary. People are less worried with how everything looks, but more concerned with the emotional impact they receive. Art is food and food is art.

French poet Charles Baudelaire famously coined the term 'modernity' as 'the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable'. This particularly characterises the transitory nature of contemporaneity, highlighting the importance art has in capturing the experience of this urban cosmopolitan. Through The Metamorphosis and The Judgement, Franz Kafka uses literature in order to portray 'the sickness of modernity' in which 'tradition has crumbled under the onslaught'. Kafka draws upon the negative aspects of this industrial civilisation, particularly highlighting

Kafka an author who published a collection of stories that represents a series of artists. In this collection the author shows how art and reality, artist and society are related and the consequences of artistic perfection. Kafka's work has an allegorical quality, in which his narratives constitutes a normal world with elements of fantasy. “ A Fasting-Artist is one of the stories in the collection by Kafka which pertains the pain of the artists, specially relating it to the contemporary artistically starving performance artists. It is a story that represents the artist's time-line from being popular in the Amphitheater to being unknown before his death in the cirque. “A Fasting-Artist” is a story that is narrated by a pansophical third person

In Europe in the early nineteen hundreds, a man who calls himself the Hunger Artist, fasts for a living. The Hunger Artist, who identifies himself as only a professional faster, travels with his “manager” known as Impresario, to small European villages. Once there, the two put on a show. The show consisted of the hunger artist being locked in a cage for up to forty days without any food. People would come and watch him perform different things as he starved. For the Impresario, it was only a show where he saw the chance for self gain. However, for the Hunger Artist, this was a test. The Hunger Artist enjoyed pushing himself to the limit and did it to be admired by the public. The story continued and the popularity of professional faster declined. The Hunger Artist eventually joined the circus where he continued to push himself to the point of breaking his own record. He eventually does so and then dies after not being seen by anyone. He was found by a circus worker and then buried. After his cage was empty, the circus replaced him for a panther that was full of energy and entertainment.

The story ‘A Hunger Artist’ is an imaginary story. Kafka’s imaginations are difficult to understand by an average reader, the reader himself needs to have a high level of imagination to understand what Kafka is trying to explain. That said, a few things are important about ‘A Hunger Artist’: it concerns itself with art, suffering and the artist’s relation to his audience. One of Kafka’s major topics in his other work is of the negative effect industrialization and capitalism has on art. Kafka paints a unique portrait of the hunger artist as the passionate starving artist who ignores his poverty and the necessity of a regular job. His cage is his cramped apartment from where his artistic inspiration springs and he never looks at his cage’s clock.