The Hunger Artist Essay

“A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was written in 1924; the year he died. The writer is considered as one of the most prominent writers who came out during the late 19th and early 20th century. In spite of the significant work of Kafka, yet he did not have literary success during his lifetime. Few of his work were published when he was alive and most of them after his death. “The Hunger Artist” structures four stories, which demonstrate the concise style of Kafka, which also mark the stories he wrote at the end of his life. Kafka’s story is fiction associated with modernism. Kafka put together social, philosophical, and political themes into its narrative. Through the themes, characterization, language,

The author defines imagery by manipulating the environment to reflect characters’ emotions and describe the importance of sacrifice. When the father quits the house with the cat, Bedard describes that “[t]he kitchen light went off, and the house darkened.” (57) These details inform us that a big moment of fear and tension is felt inside the house, especially the little

One can unknowingly suffer for the sake of society’s convenience. Both authors, Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin, demonstrate the suffering that the protagonist endures in order to serve their society. A variety of rhetorical strategies and modes contribute to the overall role of the protagonists. Ray Bradbury uses personification and the rhetorical mode of pathos to convey the oblivious suffering that the protagonist, the “smart house”, undergoes. Ursula Le Guin utilizes diction and the rhetorical mode of pathos to demonstrate the society’s dependency on the life of a young, hopeless boy. Through the authors’ use of diction, personification, and the rhetorical mode of pathos, readers can view both short stories in a new criticism lense and juxtapose two societies that feature a suffering aspect in each story.

Rulfo’s stories achieve exceptional symmetry between form and content, compelling the reader to be absorbed by their inexhaustible depth that is created by the desolation that marks intricate human landscapes. These stories are truly artistic representations, for the word choices never seem so casual, and the powerful images weave the scenes into an organic, effortless whole. Rulfo infuses the reader with a sense of inevitability reflected in his fated word choices that seal the characters in their inescapable destinies, which transitively traps the reader into Rulfo’s fictional world where loneliness, violence, and despondency are the focal points of society.

In conclusion, Franz Kafka’s story was about a man who turns into a cockroach for the remainder of his life and is very mistreated by his family. Like a cockroach, the common worker is one in a million, which drives us further into degrading our self-worth and assuming the worst of others. This is the modern view that readers can visualize while reading this story.

After many recent events concerning hunger artists, some are beginning to reflect on the art, and how it has come to a standing hault. Hunger artists, people who used to fast for an extended period of time, used to be incredibly popular not long ago. However, due to more modern and contemporary entertainment, many of the artists have since retired from the act.

Home is where family resides. Home is where one feels safe, like a baby in a cradle. Home is where one has a back to rely on, people to trust. For me, home is none of those things. Instead, it is the dark, empty, consuming void in which I spend my days residing. The only companionship I have is the computer screen and the dull, dusty, corroded walls which surround my only home. The walls serve their purpose, as was expected of them: to protect me from the hideous monsters outside. The ugly, manipulating, disgusting monsters who lure one in with their sweetness and proceed to strangle one from the inside out. The monsters who do terrible things, things I wish not to speak of within the confinements of these pages, things that make my blood run cold as if there were a specter within my midst. The

In “An Experiment in Misery” Stephen Crane opens the essay by setting a depressing tone. Crane shares experiences of struggles to set the tone of dark and despairing emotions. Crane sets the sad tone by stating “A youth was trudging slowly, without enthusiasm, with his hands buried deep in his trousers’ pockets, toward the downtown places where beds can be hired for coppers” (63). Through this dejected tone it is made apparent that this “youth” is sad and lonely. Crane uses vivid imagery from the beginning to set the tone early on for the rest of the story. In this story a young man “goes forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, and sleep as the homeless sleep” (63). It is here that Crane makes it known this experiment in misery is him placing himself in

The artist is trying to show how homeless people are literally sinking in homelessness. The man is the focal point of the picture, he is where the eye is first drawn. He is lying, half slumped against a glass windowed storefront on the charcoal colored sidewalk. He is caucasian, it’s almost hard to tell because of the dirt abiding on his face. He has greyish hair that goes down to his shoulders, accompanied by a greyish white beard that almost reaches his chest. He is wearing a grey long sleeved shirt, with a brown jacket. His hands are wrapped in black gloves that only cover his palms. His jeans are half brown with dirt.One leg isalsomt completely in the sidewalk, showing how homelessness is becoming even more of an issue than before. His shoes are like that of the gloves, almost half socks that do not cover his toes, only the soles. Next to him is “luggage”with various patterns.

The Hunger Artist was misunderstood by everyone except himself. Everyone saw him as someone in a cage wasting away to nothing, starving himself for fame, but maybe the Hunger Artist’s last words were true, that he was only starving himself simply because he could not find anything he liked to eat. But the Hunger Artist knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. All he ever wanted to do was succeed in fasting, the people loved him at first, but towards the end of his career people seemed to lose interest, and maybe the Hunger Artist was doing this for an adrenaline rush the entire time.

Through much of Franz Kafka’s writing, the reader can see how his personal experiences and viewpoints are clearly worked into his many stories. One of which stands out is his story A Hunger Artist. In this story Kafka speaks through the hunger artist of the alienation and isolation he feels in his own body, as well as the emptiness he feels as a result of the disconnected relationship he and his father share. Ironically this emptiness manifests itself quite literally at the end of Kafka’s life, when he dies as a result of tuberculosis of the larynx, which causes him to literally starve to death, just as the hunger artist in the story. It was said about his writing “the early manifestations of authentic originality were nurtured in solitary

In many of the stories that we’ve read by Franz Kafka, food has been a reoccurring motif, tying into many of the themes present in Kafka’s storylines. The main characters have consistently been seen hungering and some desperately search for food while others try to abandon the requirement of eating. In his stories, Kafka has used the object of food and the state of hunger to help identify the major conflicts regarding the main characters in their lives. In these stories, the protagonists each suffer in some way and at the root of their suffering is food and hunger, whether it be literal or figurative.

Analysis: In “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun, the unnamed narrator struggles to survive in his Norwegian home of Christiania. His income is a combination of money he makes from selling off his personal affects to a local pawn shop, and from writing articles for a local newspaper. He struggles desperately to earn enough money, between these two sources, to live off of. The protagonist, often times, runs out of money and is left to starve without food or drink for days at a time. As he starves, it becomes more difficult for him to write in order to make more money, as he slowly loses his mind when without nourishment. As a result, his writing is less than satisfactory from his editor’s opinion. Therefore, the less money he makes, the more he struggles to make more, and so the cycle of starvation and insanity continues. He loses his room, he struggles to find places to sleep, and often spends nights going from acquaintance to acquaintance attempting to find a place to sleep. Many nights he ends up with nowhere to stay. As his mind deteriorates, so does his physical appearance. He becomes incredibly thin, with a

In “A Hunger Artist”, Franz Kafka utilizes his skill as a writer and a poet to allegorically tell the reader of his own suffering through a tale of an artist’s slavery to his craft. Kafka’s own life parallels the plot and characters of this short story in elements such as starvation, obsession, and loss of will as they are explored in the plot of this work. Whether intentional or not, his comments on isolation, suffering, and art become a mirror to his own psyche and allow the reader a look into the mind of the genius who penned the work. The deteriortation of the title character in “A Hunger Artist” highlighted by autobiographical elements in the work exemplifies

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.