A Hunger Artist Lesson Plan

"A Hunger Artist" is a short story by Franz Kafka that describes the experiences of a "hunger artist," a person who starves themself for an audience. At first, the hunger artist is incredibly popular, attracting large audiences for strict and sensational forty-day fasts. Over time, audiences lose interest in the concept of a hunger artist, and the hunger artist stops being able to tour; he hires himself to a circus, where he is over time forgotten, and starves to death. Just before the moment of his death, the circus workers find him, and he confesses that he was a hunger artist only because he couldn't find anything he liked to eat. After he dies, he is replaced in his cage by a...