"The Hunger Artist" is one of the most famous short stories of Franz Kafka written in 1922, which was also the year that he had to give up the insurance job because of his illness. After that he felt better and met a new lover, but unfortunately two years later in 1924 he died. The artist in the story seems to indicate Kafka himself and in the end he died as a sacrificed martyr. The hunger artist is the typical Kafka protagonist alienated, misunderstood, and victimized by society. We can trace several features of the story back to Kafka's life. Like the hunger artist in his cage, Kafka always lived in cramped housing; however, the former feels free in his cage, while Kafka felt confined. To support his family, Kafka was forced to take on an office job he hated, especially since he felt it interfered with his writing. Likewise, the hunger artist must hire himself out to a circus, where his art is no longer appreciated.
             On one hand, the author used artistic language to depict the art of hunger; on another hand, the author also give recommends to the hunger artist's behavior and his own personality. Kafka made two sides into one story and used symbolized rhetoric to express his confusion and self-criticism. This story can be mainly divided into three parts. The first part describes the artist's former performance, but at that time he had been unsatisfied with his action before "positive revulsion from professional fasting". The second part showed his unhappy experience in a large circus. At last, there are two paragraphs deepening the story. The hunger artist finally found "because I couldn't find the food I liked", so he insisted fasting until he died.
             In the first part, however, these days people's interest in professional fasting gradually diminished, once upon a time hunger artist was fashionable and people bought tickets to watch his fasting enthusiastically. For adults, it was...