Just give me some Candy, before I go

The hunger artist by Franz Kafka is an article that leaves you a little confused. It’s about a man whose job it was to fasten for forty days straight in a cage. It was a sort of a spectacle for everyone else to see and admire. Kafka describes the way the hunger artist perceives his duty. He says that for the hunger artist it wasn’t a pain to fasten, it was a joy. The man couldn’t do anything else to be happy. As the people don’t enjoy watching him anymore when the times change, he goes on and fastens anyways. He ends up dying because his supervisors and the rest of the world forgot about him. When he’s found, his last words are about food. He says that the reason why he had to fasten was because he couldn’t find any food that he liked. He article reminded me of Hunger by Knut Hamsun because of the way the hunger artist is described. It says that he’s got wild outbursts of rage and a feeling of nausea when he thinks about food. In the book, the man has to vomit every time he eats something. He wants food but he doesn’t. It almost seems like he wants to starve, and this is the part that I don’t understand, merely because I don’t know what it’s like to fasten.

The hunger artist’s last sentence saying that he never found a food worth good enough to eat reminded me of the book ‘The perfume’ by Patrick Süsskind. This story is about a guy named Grenouille that murders women for their smell. He finds them (their scents) to be so beautiful that he has to own them no matter what. He can’t stop because maybe he hasn’t found the right one just yet and needs to go on with his collecting of scents. I imagine a hunger artist to be someone that can’t get enough of starving, of hungering, of being in pain. It might even be relieving when they can’t even feel the hunger anymore and all they’re able to perceive is emptiness and their own thoughts. I wish that there was more in the text written about the feelings of the hunger artist. It would be interesting to know what drives this force of hunger. What does someone think about that hasn’t eaten in weeks? Could there possibly be anything else than food to think of?