Human Struggle and Inspiration: A Study of Franz Kafka's Work

The era of eastern and central Europe is a momentous time in modern history. From the beginnings of tsarist Russia to Hitler’s reign in the 1940s, happiness and euphoria have seldom been present in the lives of those who reside there. However, one of these sad souls ended up using his horrific past to move him forward in the writing industry; his name was Franz Kafka. Growing up in Czechoslovakia, he had a tough relationship with his father, which inspired the majority of family relationships in his works, published after Kafka’s death without his permission. He consistently covered and explored human struggle in some of his novels, including “A Hunger Artist”, as well as “In the Penal Colony”. In “A Hunger Artist”, the hunger artist’s profession

The Hunger Artist’s profession, fasting for an extended period of time, is his life. He sits and people watch as he gets himself closer to death by starvation. Over time, he starves himself until it is his only purpose, in which he says, “I have to fast, I can’t help it...his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast” (“A Hunger Artist” 5). In this quote, Kafka uses the word “dimming”, used in this context as meaning ‘slowly and tiredly’, to show how fatigued the Hunger Artist is after his years of torturing himself in order to entertain the people around him. The speed with which his eyes shut show that he barely even has the energy to close his eyes before his demise, emphasizing his relief of pain and stress. Similarly, in “In the Penal Colony”, the Officer gets frustrated and puts himself in the Apparatus with the sentence of “Be Just”. Then, with the machine on, it malfunctions: “the Harrow was not writing but only stabbing, and the bed was not rolling the body, but lifting it, quivering, up into the needles...It was murder, pure and simple… [his] lips were firmly pressed together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead” (“In the Penal Colony” 18). In this scene, Kafka is

After his prevalence decreased for many weeks, the Hunger Artist gave up on living, so much so that he passed. In fact, “An overseer’s eye fell on the cage one day and he asked the attendant why this perfectly good cage should be left standing there with dirty straw inside it; nobody knew, until one man, helped out by the notice board, remembered about the hunger artist” (“A Hunger Artist” 5). The Hunger Artist is irrelevant at the end because of fasting, which is his profession and why he is in his cage in the first place. The “dirty straw” is symbolic as to how little they truly cared about him. Pigs and goats live in dirty straw, giving him little to no worth. The facility doesn’t have the decency to give the Hunger Artist proper care, due to lack of attention considering no one has any idea that the Hunger Artist still lived. Similarly, the Officer was alone in his death, as well as towards the end of his life. When describing his relationship with the New Commandment, the Officer says, “he keeps the cash box for machinery under his own control, and if I ask him for a new strap, he demands the torn one as a piece of evidence, the new one doesn’t arrive for ten days and it’s an inferior brand, of not much use to me. But how am I supposed to get the machine to work in the meantime without a strap--no one’s concerned about that”