Todd Schonhardt
English 112 - E
Essay One
A Hunger Artist
In my first essay, I looked at a short story titled “A Hunger Artist”. This was a short story that was originally not written in English but then interpreted to English by Edwin and Willa Muir. This story was about a profession of fasting, where a single person starved him or herself for forty days. This story showed symbolism as well as having a lessoned to be learned at the end of it. The story took the tone of a parable from the Bible, where one person teaches many people of life lesson to be learned.
This story had only a few characters, the storyteller, the audience or onlookers and the hunger artist. The audience played a key role in the story as all of them had different outlooks on what the so-called “artist” was doing. Some onlookers thought that what the artist was doing was inappropriate and foolish. While other viewers thought that what the artist was doing was motivational and would stay up all night watching. Many people were skeptic, thinking that the artist would cheat during the nights when no one was watching. Others, even when watching, tried to give the artist an opportunity to cheat but he never did so.
The hunger artist played the main character, although barely speaking throughout the entire story, but the narrator never stopped talking about what the artist was doing. The artist was given attributes through the audience, not through the narrator. There were many attributes to describe the artist, such as, crazy, selfish, inappropriate, miraculous and amazing. The hunger artist never had to say anything in the story; he showed it all by his act of fasting.
The storyteller played a huge role by discussing the reactions the audience gave to the hunger artists’ work. The storyteller gave us the idea of what the artist was going through, as well as finding out what the audience was seeing in the artist. He or she painted a picture, and gave me the felling...