A Hunger Artist

In a small barred cage on a bed of scattered straw, a man starves himself for public amusement. There was a time when an entire city would turn out to watch him, buying subscription tickets to stare at his protruding ribs by torchlight. But the era of the hunger artist is ending, and the crowds have moved on.

Left behind by a society that views his emaciation as a passing fashion, the performer refuses to eat. He commits himself entirely to his starvation, pushing his fasting far beyond the limits once enforced by his managers, even as the world stops looking.

Published in 1922, shortly before Franz Kafka died of starvation caused by laryngeal tuberculosis, the story is a central work of European modernism. It reduces the isolation of the creator in an indifferent society to a literal, physical extreme.