The Hunger Artist Sparknotes

Throughout history people have enjoyed watching individuals push their bodies to the limit. This can be seen in extreme feats of strength, contortions, and athleticism. In the nineteenth century there were many cases of female hunger artists, who would starve themselves. However, there is the question of rather or not they were motivated by anorexia nervosa, which is a nervous disorder or anorexia mirabilis, the desire to separate the flesh and the spirit by starvation. (Heywood 1996, pg. 72). The “Hunger Artist” is a story that tells about a hunger artist. A man who gained fame by pushing his body to the limit of life and death as he would set starving in a cage for forty days. This paper will look at the use of common sense in the story as well as the role that peace and/ or violence played in the use of common sense within the story. The protagonist who has no name because Kafka wanted to make a point of how easily a person is forgotten (McCulloch & Radia, 2012 pg. 53). The spectators
First fasting for forty days and then being forced to eat would put an unhealthy strain on a person’s body. However, the manager was right about the hunger artist’s irritable behavior being because he was hungry from fasting. The hunger artist shows no common sense because he does not or cannot recognize the signs from his own body telling him that he needs to eat. Another way that everyone in the story lacked commonsense is that no one realized that the hunger artist was not just fasting because he was putting on a show, but that he was most likely anorexic. This could be seen in his anger at being made to eat, the fact that he did not insist on being fed when he knew it was passed the forty days and his own admission that he did not like the taste of food. In the hunger artist’s mind, he needed to become nothing in order to satisfy his desire to be something (Heywood 1996 pg.