Franz Kafka A Hunger Artist Analysis

Hunger is defined as a feeling of discomfort or weakness caused by lack of food; in other words, the desire or craving to eat food. However, in Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” this character gives a different, more compound definition to this term. As stated towards the end of the story, the Hunger Artist says that he was in fact never hungry, he just never found anything that he liked. With this being said, what does this character’s hunger truly insinuate? This insinuates that the Hunger Artist was not hungry for food, because instead he had a hunger for attention, fame, reputation, and honor. Franz Kafka was well-groomed to write a story about an isolated character, for he never married, his father detested him, and he was a Jew during

He struggles as an artist himself, as a writer, and as a human being. He feels misunderstood and tormented, perhaps exactly what this story is all about. The irrationality in the people that surround the Hunger Artist, and the inconsistency of the audience is reflective of this vision that Kafka wrote an autobiography of himself, as there is no reader who can truly understand what he is experiencing in life, his thoughts, ideologies, emotions, or intentions. Not even the remarkable admiration of the spectators for the Hunger Artist can, at least in the beginning of the story, be considered to be a success for him in Kafka's point of view because it is based on a serious misinterpretation of the artist's

In the beginning of the story, the narrator tells the readers that “no one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuously, day and night, and so no one could produce first hand evidence that the fast had really been rigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that, he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast.” This statement implies that the artist is the only one on his “team.” He is alone. When reading this story, you discover that the artist has an “impresario” who accompanies him on his journey. You immediately think that the artist has a partner, or friend, who is there to support and share the journey with him, but suddenly that idea is crushed when the narrator states “yet the impresario had a way of punishing these outbreaks which he rather enjoyed putting into operation.” Even the one person along his side enjoys his punishment, and this character is distinctly a representation of Kafka’s mother,