The Hunger Artist:

'Thoreau and the Irony of Performance Art'

Essay by Jianan Qian at The Millions.

"After spending almost a year translating English professor Laura Dassow Walls’s most recent biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, I was finally done. I thought I deserved some celebration, something fun, fiction perhaps. So, I took The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction from my bookshelf and flipped to a random page: 'A Hunger Artist' by Franz Kafka. At first, I was disappointed at the serendipity. As a teenager, I had read the story twice in Chinese —it revolves around a weird man who starves to death for a performance—but I decided to go with the flow. This time, the story made me tremble. You may think I say this because my mind was still full of Thoreau, but it is true: 'A Hunger Artist' is a portrait of Thoreau’s life."

See Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, and A Plea for Captain John Brown, in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 6

See Kafka, "The Metamorphosis", in Great Books of the Western World (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 60.