Analyzing Kafka's The Hunger Artist

Here is a story about a man who shows his starving body in a cage while people stare at him to make sure that he does not sneak food. The cage in which the hunger artist does his fasting in represents the division between spectators and spectacle. Since the audience was unable to understand the artistic views of the hunger artist in the cage, the spectators see a sad crazy man who could possibly be cheating during the fast. The cage also represents a safety block that prevents the people’s judgments of the hunger artist.

On page 644 second paragraph, a conversation between the overseer and the hunger artist take place, “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. This conversation tells the audience that the artist has a complicated relationship with his audience, and which he needs validation and to feel superior over his

We live in a world where artists make the familiar seem strange. Artists take something normal and turn it into something so weird and abnormal to make us think, what is the point of this or what is going on here? By the way Kafka writes in The Hunger Artist, he uses a writing technique in which he illustrates a characters feelings about something rather than the objective. He interprets what he sees in his story in a distorted matter to represent what the reality of it is. Not everyone perceives things the same way. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. One of Kafka’s messages was that people pay more attention to the new materialistic items. He is expressing the world’s indifference to its own art through the eyes of the character hunger artist. People now and days do not just survive on food but on the acceptance and observation of other on