“A Hunger Artist”: Death is His Destiny DOCX

Title	“A Hunger Artist”: Death is His Destiny
Author	Francis Yang
Pages	4
File Size	25.6 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	4
Total Views	102

Summary

1 Yang Fan Yang Professor Rotaru GPC, section 003 22 September 2014 “A Hunger Artist”: Death is His Destiny Although the hunger artist is the central character throughout the whole story and we learn much about him in our following reading after the very first paragraph, Franz Kafka seems to invest ...

Description

1 Yang Fan Yang Professor Rotaru GPC, section 003 22 September 2014 "A Hunger Artist": Death is His Destiny Although the hunger artist is the central character throughout the whole story and we learn much about him in our following reading after the very first paragraph, Franz Kafka seems to invest more effort in describing and demonstrating other elements of the story other than the protagonist in the opening of his short story "A Hunger Artist". This paragraph is crucial to our understanding of the destiny of the hunger artist as we can create new possibilities for interpretation via using the method of narrative-semiotic analysis. In this essay, I will demonstrate how narrative-semiotic analysis provide the audience more perspectives on interpreting the protagonist in "A Hunger Artist" and more importantly, the reason why the first paragraph foreshadows the death of the hunger artist. Mieke Bal defines framing of a story in his his book Narratology:Introduction to the Theory of Narrative as "a first and a last word to be defined" and "boundaries" of a story, which is, in other words, the time and place, as well as the social environment of the story (5). Kafka's ability to paint a picture with words takes the audience to a world which is depressing, gloomy and full of lament at the very start of their reading. To be more specific, in the first two sentences he uses time markers, such as "used to" and the first prepositional phrase in the whole story "During these last decades" , which gives us a sense that all of the glory of this hunger artist has become a bygone memory . Meanwhile, by using words like "markedly diminished", "impossible" and "different", Kafka brings us to a...