Looking Inside Franz Kafka

Looking inside Kafka in "A Hunger Artist"

Looking inside Kafka in “A Hunger Artist”

by Franz Kafka

A Psychoanalytic Reading

By Raymund Salazar

AB English

Thesis Statement: “The psyche of the people towards the hunger artist as a metaphor to the inconsistency, frailty and superficiality of human belief; through the eyes of Kafka as the hunger artist himself"

The story's use of profound metaphors, symbolisms and allegorical abstractions, are too intricately bound and woven so that a singular interpretation of "A hunger Artist" is a total impossibility. Therefore, this paper will try to tackle only two of the possible interpretations: the story as an autobiographical representation of Kafka himself, and his commentary on the flaws and frailty of human belief.

The story is about a hunger artist who professionally fasts for the entertainment of the people but later found himself struggling to keep his reputation and acclaim up, for the people began to slowly lose interest in his act; people even think he cheats by sneaking food; and his manager limits his fasting for forty days even though the hunger artist believes he can last longer. Without notice, the audience deserts the hunger artist. The hunger artist hires himself out to a circus and there people only watch him because he is near the menagerie, not because they are interested in him. He remains neglected until one day an overseer asks him if he is still fasting. The hunger artist asks for forgiveness and explains that people should not admire his fasting; he simply could never find any food he liked, but if he had, he would have eaten it. With that, he dies. The circus replaces him in his cage with a panther. Everyone is fascinated by the vitality of the panther, and they never want to move away.

Kafka sees himself in the hunger artist, his struggles as an artist himself, as a writer and as a human being- misunderstood and tormented- the apparent failure in understanding the true meaning of his works; the extent and depth of his parables and stories he felt can be truly understood by no one (at times even himself). And although most of his works were posthumous, Kafka might have foreseen a great difficulty from his future readers in trying to understand his works (this maybe why he had wished for all his works to be destroyed), - just as the hunger artist asked the people not to appreciate his fasting in the end- he saw the frailty of an average person’s mind to see his story’s true worth. The folly in people around the hunger artist, there superficiality and inconsistency as followers of the performance, is reflective of this vision of Kafka, that there can be no reader who can truly understand what he is experiencing, his thoughts and ideologies, that his stories cannot, at any rate, embody fully Kafka’s true intentions, emotions and understandings. Like the Hunger artist who had exerted all his effort to show to the people how authentic and true he was with his craft, singing even just to prove that he was not cheating when the watchers leaves him alone, but all of it to no avail. “No one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuously, and so no one could produce first-hand evidence that the fast had really been rigorous and continuous; he was the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast.”

The meaning of fasting as an art is reflective of Kafka’s human spirit and of his ‘humanness.’ Kafka lived a life of indifference, solitude and discontent, working for years on a job he did not even want and even detested, and having had very little social life during his adult years. It was in these monotonies, superficialities and trivialities of human life that he saw himself discouraged and helplessly disparate from; the many failed marriages he suffered (or not) and the tumultuous relationship he had with his father, left a deep impression on this story, the suffering of the hunger artist, not out of starvation, but out of the lack of appreciation and understanding. Kafka saw his human spirit and mind emaciated and deteriorated in out of the shallowness of the conventional, out of his own incapacity to fully satisfy his spiritual and intellectual needs, which seemed to be rather insatiable, with Man’s known accepted logic, values and thinking, the many truths Man felt so sure about did not appeal to him- or nothing appealed to him at all. We see this in the last words of the