The Hunger Artist
Does Kafka’s Hunger Artist create a new sense of the body? If so, how? And how does the Hunger Artist’s strange human body compete against animals’ bodies in this story?
Create a clear and direct overall thesis and argue.
!
Kafka’s “ A Hunger Artist”, illustrates a compelling reinvention of the body
through the story of a single act in a circus where a man goes forty days without the consumption of food in efforts to horrify his audience. Kafka’s story portrays the artist’s internal conflicts as he faces his own addiction to starvation, with the external destruction of the artist’s withering body. As the story develops, the hunger artist becomes less of a spectacle to the audience and more of an unrelatable freak and is eventually replaced, ironically, with a healthy young panther. Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” exposes the fundamental will to defy traditional human convention, by defining a new sense of the body as the power of the mind through characterizing a basic need as a common desire. Kafka contrasts the artist’s diminished body with an ordinary panther that presents the spectators with a symbol of life and complete fulfillment. The hunger artist is able to construe a contemporary sense of body with his indifference to temptation and neglecting to be glutinous, therefore pushing his mind farther then his body. The artist also shapes the new sense of body through building on the idea that there is a distinct difference between desire and need. In articulating this distinction, the artist creates a paradox based on the idea that by desiring nothing, he will be fulfilled.
Kafka takes the human body to new extremes and pushes the hunger artist to the boundaries of desire, redefining the traditional sense of body.
!
The hunger artist was genuine about his form of art and fully immersed
himself into fasting. The hunger artist was constantly bomb-barred with the allurement of food, however,“the initiates knew well enough that during
Create a clear and direct overall thesis and argue.
!
Kafka’s “ A Hunger Artist”, illustrates a compelling reinvention of the body
through the story of a single act in a circus where a man goes forty days without the consumption of food in efforts to horrify his audience. Kafka’s story portrays the artist’s internal conflicts as he faces his own addiction to starvation, with the external destruction of the artist’s withering body. As the story develops, the hunger artist becomes less of a spectacle to the audience and more of an unrelatable freak and is eventually replaced, ironically, with a healthy young panther. Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” exposes the fundamental will to defy traditional human convention, by defining a new sense of the body as the power of the mind through characterizing a basic need as a common desire. Kafka contrasts the artist’s diminished body with an ordinary panther that presents the spectators with a symbol of life and complete fulfillment. The hunger artist is able to construe a contemporary sense of body with his indifference to temptation and neglecting to be glutinous, therefore pushing his mind farther then his body. The artist also shapes the new sense of body through building on the idea that there is a distinct difference between desire and need. In articulating this distinction, the artist creates a paradox based on the idea that by desiring nothing, he will be fulfilled.
Kafka takes the human body to new extremes and pushes the hunger artist to the boundaries of desire, redefining the traditional sense of body.
!
The hunger artist was genuine about his form of art and fully immersed
himself into fasting. The hunger artist was constantly bomb-barred with the allurement of food, however,“the initiates knew well enough that during