The Hunger Artist By Franz Kafka in.pptx

A brief introduction to kafka's short story, A Hunger Artist.

1. Hunger artist! Franz Kafka

2. OUTLINE About the Author Overview Critical Analysis of A Hunger Artist  Conclusion 

3. About the Author Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. Anxiety and alienation are two main characters of Kafka’s work, and the characters in his stories are often faced with weird and absurd situations. He is famous for his novels The Trial, in which a man is charged with a crime that is never named, and The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist wakes to find himself transformed into an insect. The story, “a hunger artist” was first published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922. The story was also included in the collection A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler ), the last book Kafka prepared for publication, printed after Kafka's death. 

4. Overview of the Hunger Artist This is a story that revolves around a man who is a professional faster or a hunger artist. With the support of a business manager known as the impresario, he spends his days starving himself in a cage while the public comes to watch him. The man takes his profession very seriously, thinking of himself as an artist rather than just a freak. He is embarrassed and humiliated and is offended at any suggestion or indication that his fast may not be pure meaning that he could be cheating and sneaking food when no one is watching.

5. COnt.  Several people stand guard at his cage every night to ensure that he isn't cheating. Even after having witnesses over his cage that he isn’t cheating people point fingers at him that he may be sneaking food in the cage. Nothing is more important to the artist than maintaining the purity and integrity of his fasting. The impresario has placed a 40 day limit on his fasting, these limits were made after the observations made on spectator interest.  Every 40 days, crowds surround the cage to watch two doctors and two young ladies help the hunger artist out of the cage to a table where a meal is waiting The hunger artist is reluctant to break his fast, even the impresario and the crowd encourage him to eat. He fights to extend his fast even further, and several small bites of food have to practically be forced into his mouth before he is allowed to go back to his fasting.

6. He artist is living in a time when interest in fasting as a spectacle is beginning to decline. Soon comes a time when hardly anyone comes to watch him starving himself. He bids his goodbye to the impresario and joins a large circus. Here, his cage is placed near the animals, but hardly anyone stops to watch him fast.  Eventually, no one stops to watch the hunger artist at all. Soon everyone forgets about the hunger artist, the circus management stops updating the board that records the number of days the man has been fasting. Although the artist finally exceeds his fasting limits, no one is there to appreciate his accomplishments, and even he himself loses track of how many days he has fasted.

7. The hunger artist becomes so small and weak that his cage appears empty except for a pile of straw. When a circus worker pokes at the straw, he realizes that the starving man is still there and alive.  but barely. Deliriously, the hunger artist tells him that he's never deserved anyone's admiration, that he couldn't help but fast. When asked why, the artist delivers his last words, like a punch line to a long-running joke: ''Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.'' After uttering his last words, the hunger artist dies. The circus replaces him with a panther, whose wild strength and virility sharply contrasts with the weird man who had previously occupied the cage.

8. Critical Analysis of A Hunger Artist  The hunger artist feels very separated from the society. He has a troubled relationship with his spectators and nobody gets him the way he wants them to the hunger artist’s pride on his fasting make him unappealing to the society.  The fruitless was of his fasting: he was left empty and weak and didn’t achieve anything from his fasting in the end.  The hunger artist becomes a spectacle and portrays his fasting as a form of art and entertainment.

9. He seeks validation from the public. Ironically, by trying to be a greater spectacle he totally falls out of public validation after joining the cage.  The cage in which the hunger artist resides in the circus symbolizes his alienation, and lack of understanding between the public and himself. The cage represents the hunger artist’s body in which he feels imprisoned. The cage also represents security, protecting the hunger artist from those who do not understand him.  The clock in the hunger artist’s cage is a constant reminder of his failure.  The hunger artist’s cage is replaced by a panther’s in the end. The panther is totally in contrast with the hunger artist. Free and lively. He is powerful and wild while the hunger artist was quite the opposite. 

10. In “A Hunger Artist,” the hunger artist’s troubled relationship with his spectators suggests that the artist is isolated from society and must therefore be misunderstood.  In the hunger artist’s case, being an artist means cutting oneself off from the world, we can determine this from the fact that he voluntarily put himself in a cage. Set apart from others, only the hunger artist realizes the importance of his ambitions and accomplishments, and only he knows that he is not cheating and no one else knows or understands his motives. The further the hunger artist goes in search of perfection, as he does in the circus, the further away he moves from the understanding of the people for whom he performs. 

11. Then comes the harmful effects of pride. Although the hunger artist’s fierce pride in his art enables him to improve his fasting, his pride also stops him from achieving his goals as his connections to others are destroyed and he’s isolated and unappealing to the public eye. He looks on his emaciated frame and protruding ribcage with vanity and thinks of them as badges of honor , but his pitiful, body is very unappealing to the women who initially want to carry him from his cage at the end of his fast. In this case, his starved body is the thing that ensures he will never be loved and admired by the public. Pride turns the hunger artist away from others and into himself, and he reinforces his isolation by imprisoning himself in a cage and meditating intensely

12. In the end, pride guarantees the hunger artist not fame and transcendence, but obscurity. The hunger artist relishes in his hunger throughout the story, hoping that it will lead to spiritual satisfaction but in the end he gains nothing from his fasting except emptiness. The hunger artist refuses food, but his self-denial reveals his need for a different kind of nourishment: public recognition and artistic perfection. Hunger, for both physical and spiritual nourishment, is the subject of his performance. Apart from his performance the hunger artist desires something nobody in the world can give him

13. Conclusion  When the overseer assures him that everyone does admire him, the hunger artist tells the overseer that they shouldn’t, confessing that he has fasted only because in life he could not find food that he liked. With these words, the hunger artist dies